mass media

Dear Censorial Overseers

The deletion of the comment quoted below in this notification is perhaps the most odious of all those made under this article today, all done without any clearly discernible reason but with quite evident rhyme. The comment below asks you to show respect for these commentators who have suffered deletion of their genuine and reasonable comment by providing an open advice as to the basis of that consistent disbursement of negative action.

The unavoidable message from your early closure of comments, following directly upon the posting of the request for your reasoned advice, is that you do not have respect for your reader and commenters. It also clearly demonstrates your publication’s covert imposition of a controlled narrative rather than being the relatively free arena for informed adult conversation that your promotion pretends you to be.

As I’ve already made mention of, as the repetitive and unexplained evidence mounted, your pretence and hypocrisy as an intellectual forum is comical; sadly, bleakly, disturbingly so, but comical nonetheless.

With some good fortune the cumulative load of Covid19 distress will be the death of your horridly sneaky and cynical enterprise. Hopefully, well-meaning staff will then find some useful jobs in which to sustain themselves within a wider community in need of real re-construction that is free of the property development, migration agency and associated Empire roles that your sponsors pursue ahead of real education, with the active assistance of this mouthpiece.

Kindest regards

Greg Wood

On 14 Apr 2020, at 4:51 pm, The Conversation wrote:

The Conversation
Academic rigour, journalistic flair

Hello G⁠r⁠e⁠g,

Your comment on ‘Why is it so hard to stop COVID-19 misinformation spreading on social media?’ has been removed.

There are several reasons why this may have occurred:

Your comment may have breached our community standards. For example it may have been a personal attack, or you might not have used your real name.
Your comment may have been entirely blameless but part of a thread that was removed because another comment had to be removed.
It might have been removed for another editorial reason, for example to avoid repetition or keep the conversation on topic.
For practical reasons we reserve the right to remove any comment and all decisions must be final, but please don’t take it personally.

If you’re playing by the rules it’s unlikely to happen again, so feel free to continue to post new comments and engage in polite and respectful discussion.

For your reference, the removed comment was:

Moderators have removed an entirely rational and reasonable comment by Duncan Mouat. The pattern of deletions is now profuse and appears to be quite consistent in its objection and purpose. Given the repetition and evidently convergent aim of these deletions, can the moderators please provide a clear statement regarding the exact standard(s) these posts are deemed to have offended.

I propose that due respect for your readers and contributors requires nothing less. We should not be left guessing what the editors’ position is on these matters wherein no insult or off-topic commentary has occurred.

Please understand that these deletions resonate especially loudly within a discussion that essentially reflects upon intent censorship.

For more information you can read our standards.

Kind regards,

The Conversation

Waleed Aly ("A Rhetorical State of Emergency," Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 2019,) has dressed up banality as insight and has been very long-winded about it. His focus is climate change and he laments the fact that we have so "engineered a lack of [political] consensus" that Australia is never likely to successfully address it.

But there is a sense that Waleed believes his unique understanding sets him apart from the problems he describes ... I would like to help him find his feet of clay.

That we worry about climate change is because of the harm it is doing and will do to the natural environment; Waleed's focus, therefore, ought to be environmental decline from any cause, and not just climate change.

The two key drivers of environmental decline are the growth in human population and ever rising levels of consumption. Remarkably, the two key components of Australia's particular economic model are: more people -- population growth via high immigration -- consuming more and more ... forever.

If Australia wishes to address environmental decline -- as Waleed believes we ought -- we must address our levels of consumption and the growth in our population. The latter will require a substantial reduction in immigration -- the principal driver of our population growth.

There is a popular consensus for this measure. What stands in the way? Well, among other things, pundits like Waleed and his occasional employer, the ABC, who refuse to go anywhere near the immigration issue.

For all his posturing and puffing over our dysfunctional politics, Waleed is part of the problem he describes.

[This is a translation from the French version, "Quelle est la théorie du complot la plus crédible que vous connaissez?"] The mass media is the mouthpiece of the corporate world. It pretends to reflect the opinions of we masses but, in reality, it tries to create a perception that the exploitative economic system benefits us. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is about this conspiracy. Chomsky shows how people are convinced that the corporate media reflects the opinions and thoughts of ordinary people, even if it isn't true. Ordinary people continue to read the corporate media, believing that it will represent them. They finish up adapting to what is presented to them as the opinion of their equals, even though this is rarely true.

The idea of 'fake news' is a feature of this propaganda machine, which now characterises all criticism of its prejudices as 'fake news'. This distortion of reality is more exaggerated and obvious in video games and social media, which exploit a younger, naive, social cohort, who lack classical education.

Stigmatising the nation state

I think that one of the principal results of this media has been the stigmatisation of nationalism. When you think of it, what other concept can unite a country? Initially, small localities resisted the notion of 'nations' because they feared that nations would overwhelm their self-determination, their identities, their societiies and their local economies. In many cases, they were right, although the French system of communes within the roman (Napoleonic) system, resisted this better than the Anglosphere systems.

In general, however, national systems conquered small regional entities and people came to identify with the nation and to expect national governments to serve their people. It is important to note that the members of nations frequently won the right to vote. In effect, to vote - to be enfranchised - characterises the modern nation.

Global 'citizens' have no votes and no civic rights

Today globalism seeks to stigmatise the nation and fails to offer the global 'citizen' the right to vote on questions that concern him or her. In effect, there are no 'global' citizens. There are only global populations. National governments, once required to serve their citizens, now take orders from global forces. What globalism promises is that the global market will be the final arbiter of everything. Some elites can profit from the global market, but most of us are its playthings.

It is true that warlike elites have often abused nationalism, during the last two world wars, for example. But nationalism is also a product of the French Revolution, which gave birth to durable values of civil rights and the maintenance of the family land, rather than having it in the hands of elites. As long as the nation remains the only political level where people may vote to influence their fates, I am in favour of its preservation.

Perhaps I should qualify my implication of Chomsky's theory as a conspiracy theory, since Chomsky himself described what the mass media does as a hegemonic system, which means a sort of pragmatic adaptation by its beneficiaries, rather than having begun with a careful plan. The massive and rapid campaign to call media views outside the mass media's views 'fake news', in particular those alternative opinions against the wars and sanctions of the US-NATO, seems to me to be a true conspiracy against anyone who tries to cast doubt on US-NATO politics.

I would like to add that Quora could become a way of helping other points of view, for it provides a huge platform. This does seem rather too much to hope, but I would like to hope.

This article sprang from my response to a French language Quora question here: What is the most credible conspiracy theory you know?" (Quelle est la théorie du complot la plus crédible que vous connaissez ?).

The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

I am fed up.

I am fed up with the fact that nearly all the air time on local ABC radio is filled with discussion of the symptoms of rapid population growth and human overpopulation with scarcely a passing reference to the actual cause. For example, today I caught a discussion of wind farms on the Basalt Plains in Western Victoria. A woman called Jon Faine’s program with a concern that there are only 500 brolgas left in the area and that wind farms impinge on the birds’ territory by around an 8kms margin from each wind farm. Host, Jon Faine as devil's advocate pointed out that the brolgas could go somewhere else as the wind farms were not really taking up a lot of space. The next caller ridiculed the brolga advocate with the opposite argument that if coal continued to be used to generate electricity then there would be no environment for brolgas or anything else. Neither caller mentioned that with increasing population, more and more electricity needs to be generated either by coal or by wind farms or whatever will do the trick. The human environmental footprint in Victoria is growing from a size 10 to a size 14 with no end in sight.

I’m also fed up that the Leader newspaper was delivered to my letter box this week with the front page headline “Please ease squeeze” plastered over a photo of South Yarra railway station exit/entrance presumably at peak hour in the afternoon as the crowds are walking away from the station. According to the article the station is a daily bun fight with too many passengers for the capability of the station. Prahran State Greens MP, Sam Hibbens “has lodged a Freedom of Information request with the department of transport to find out what improvements are being considered for the bustling hub.” This same MP in 2010 as a Federal candidate was invited to reply (both in writing and by phone) to a questionnaire on population for Sustainable Population Australia but no reply was received. In a nutshell, Hibbens is calling for improvements in the station to accommodate an “extra 5000 people expected to move into the Forest Hill precinct adjacent to the station in the next 15 years.” I feel exasperated to know that it is already overcrowded, so the improvement would have to provide an enormous increase in capacity if it were to accommodate the continuous increase in population which is expected. This increase in population ensures continued discomfort and stress for passengers. This is a big deal as it is an essential part of their daily lives and we only get one life each, as far as I know. Governments don’t seem to be about improving lives at all, only talking about it, staving off complaints, and controlling what should be uproar about the completely avoidable destruction of the reasonable lives we used to lead and could have continued to have led.

I am equally fed up with the articles in the daily media such as The Age in Melbourne (several this week) about booming population growth as though it is news. To me it is just a constant feed of reminders to the readership of a decreasing quality of life due to socially engineered population hyper-growth.

Turning to the radio, the function of chat shows especially on the ABC seem to be to inveigle the audience into complicity in this terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to feel they are being heard by calling in with suggestions and their views on whether they’d like distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B. Alternatively, the programs feature trivial topics as a brief distractions from the reality of where we are heading. (As I write this, the program I can hear is dedicated to personal coincidences.)

I’d love to know what instructions the columnists of the daily newspapers are given to guide them in their articles on population growth. It must be something like “Make sure that you don’t let anyone know that high population growth is a government choice. Make it sound like a trend you are following and reporting on that has no rhyme or reason."

The ABC has done a great job documenting its Vote Compass Project. However the results highlight the role of the ABC in setting the election issue agenda, despite the fact that the ABC explains: "Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns."

Some time ago I complained to MediaWatch that the ABC Vote Compass was biased due to its omission of the Population Growth Management issue. I am still waiting on their response. The results of the Vote Compass appear to support this complaint.

The Essential Report, 23 July 2013 was a poll that identified population growth management as a Top 15 Federal Election issue without including immigration as an issue. Immigration is one input to population growth management. The outcome is arguably the issue. Just as water shortage is an outcome/issue and water consumption is one input to this issue. Numerous other polls in recent years, including ANU Polling, have also identified population growth as a significant concern for 50% or more of respondents. The ABC's Vote Compass listed immigration as an issue but omitted Population Growth Management (which is a pure sustainability issue that should be untainted by racism or xenophobia). Was this pro population growth bias?

Agenda-setting theory applied to the ABC's 'Vote Compass'

Agenda-setting theory describes the "ability [of the news media] to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda." That is, if a news item is covered frequently and prominently the audience will regard the issue as more important. Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in a study on the 1968 US presidential election. They demonstrated a strong correlation (r > .9) between what people thought was the most important election issue and what the local and national news media reported was the most important issue. By comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which the media determines public opinion. Since the 1968 study, more than 400 studies have been published on the agenda-setting function of the mass media, and the theory continues to be regarded as relevant. (ref. Wikipedia).

Neutral and/or Undecided

The Vote Compass Results show that of the 30 listed issues, the largest neutral (or undecided) votes went to:

- How many new immigrants should Australia admit? (35.9%)
- How much financial support should the Commonwealth provide to the car industry? (36.0%)
- How accessible should abortion services be in Australia? (39.4%)
- How much government regulation should there be on business? (41.1%)
- How much should the government spend on defence? (46.3%)

Were these high Neutral votes because of the complexity of the issues, a feeling of being unqualified to decide due to lack of information/understanding, or simply no opinion? The latter seems highly unlikely for the population growth management issue (which is a pure sustainability issue), and the issue itself is relatively simple to understand. Is the relationship between population growth, population size and migration being confused by government and media under-reporting the adverse impacts of rapid population growth while rapid migration continues? Does defining the issue under the banner of migration confuse and lead to any opposition being characterised as racist or xenophobic? How perfect this might be for those favouring rapid growth!

The smallest neutral or undecided votes went to:

- Medicare should offer basic dental care for everyone, even if people have to pay a higher Medicare levy. (7.4%)
- Boats carrying asylum seekers be turned back. (8.7%)
- Students in government and non-government schools should receive the same amount of federal funding. (9.0%)
- The government should further restrict foreign ownership of Australian agricultural land.(9.1%)
- Should asylum seekers who arrive by boat should not be allowed to settle in Australia (9.3%)

Was this because voters are confident that they understand these issues and/or feel they have enough information to form an opinion?

Balanced (and therefore Contentious/Controversial?)

The issues showing the most balanced agreement/disagreement (or more/less) rating (ie with the proportion of those agreeing within roughly +/-5% of the proportion disagreeing) are listed below with percentages (Neutral/Agree/Disagree):

- How may new immigrants should Australia admit? (35.9%/30.2%/33.8%) (Not covered by the ABC in lead up to the election. This is also a completely different issue to Population Growth Management which was not even listed as an issue)
- Boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back (8.7%/43.5%/43.8%) (Covered by the ABC in lead up to the election)
- The national budget deficit should be reduced, even if it means fewer public services (12.6%/45.6%/41.8%) (Covered by the ABC in lead up to the election)
- When there is an economic problem government spending usually makes it worse (18.5%/40.1%/41.4%) (Related to the above)
- Live animal exports should be banned (15.9%/39.1%/45%) (Major issue covered by the ABC)
- Australia should end the monarchy and become a republic (21.5%/40.4%/38.1%) (Subject of a Referendum in 1999)

As shown by the percentages, the immigration issue is in a class of its own; with balanced agreement/disagreement combined with a very high neutral vote.

Some conclusions

Conclusions that could be drawn from these Vote Compass results include:

- The immigration issue has one of the highest neutral and/or undecided votes, which could reflect a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this issue, relative to other issues
- The ABC did not cover the contentious immigration issue in the lead up to the election, which could reflect a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this issue, relative to other contentious issues
- The ABC did not include the Population Growth Management issue at all, which reflects a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this contentious issue, relative to other contentious issues
- Failure to cover the Population Growth Management issue, despite the results of the Vote Compass categorising the related issue of immigration as both contentious and somewhat misunderstood, indicates a degree of pro population growth bias by the ABC which is totally consistent with the ABC track record in this key area of National importance. [For more on this see Candobetter articles at: ABC bias]

Findings of the Essential Report, 23 July 2013: Which are the three most important issues in deciding how you would vote at a Federal election?

Punch Line

The Vote Compass confirms that all the major political parties (Labor, Liberal, Green) support ongoing rapid, migration-based population growth at or above current (2012) levels. In 2012 the level was 1.8% per annum (roughly 4 times the OECD country average based on CIA World Factbook Data versus ABS data for 2012).

The Vote Compass preferentially concealed the existence (under the term "other") of a party standing to represent voters concerned about population growth management (The Stable Population Party), while preferentially naming parties such as Wikileaks, Katter, Palmer. Wasn't this all simply part of the ABC's biased agenda setting?

Do results of the Vote Compass showing balanced agreement/disagreement combined with a large proportion of neutral or undecided votes, conclusively show the impact of ABC bias by omission of information in this key population policy area? Has the ABC selectively chosen to ignore an issue when it should fully understand that 50% or more of voters disagree with Liberal, Labor and Green policy? Does it really matter why this happened? Isn't it simply important to recognise the bias and make amends by correcting it? You can encourage the ABC by signing, and most importantly also forwarding, this petition. Thank you for supporting this cause:
Australia requires a public inquiry to determine a basis for the optimum rate of population growth

What, exactly, is the ABC's definition of bias in its Code of Practice? Here's what they say in their introduction: "The ABC has a statutory duty to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism....... Aiming to equip audiences to make up their own minds is consistent with the public service character of the ABC. A democratic society depends on diverse sources of reliable information and contending opinions."........ and so it continues ..........

Key findings from the ANU poll (October 2010 http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/population and http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/polls/governance and http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/polls/environment) include:

- 44 per cent of Australians favour population growth, while 52 per cent want the population to remain at or below current levels.
- Opposition to population increase is broadly-based, with concerns about the effect on the economy and the environment.
- A majority of Australians think the world’s population is too large and is causing environmental damage.
- Half of the country say people should consider limiting the sizes of their families in order to minimise the impact of population growth.
- 16 per cent of Australians would want to see population increase through more immigration rather than through increased fertility.
- Two thirds of Australians say the ageing population will cause real problems — a majority are concerned about the government’s ability to tackle the problem and reject increased taxes as a solution.

War criminals and serial liars, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, and their Australian accomplices, Prime Minster Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Bob Carr

This coming Saturday 7 September, most Australians will be forced to make the unpalatable choice between, on the one hand, the Opposition Liberal Party and the ruling Labor Party. The Liberal Party is resolved to destroy 7,000 public service jobs, remove the right of trade unions to enter workplaces and give the Green light to destructive and horrifically expensive projects such as the East-West Link and the Phillip Island industrialisation project. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as well as promoting rampant population growth and section 457 visas has, on the international stage, facilitated military aggression against Libya in 2011 and has done his utmost to repeat the exercise with Syria. Fortunately for Syria and the rest of the world, President Obama's war plans against Syria have been defeated by international and domestic opposition as described in the included article of 30 Aug 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts. It is vital, if peace and democracy are to survive that Kevin Rudd, Bob Carr and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott be held to account for their support for the U.S. Government's criminal actions.

Editorial comment

In recent days world public opinion prevented war criminals and serial liars, U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and French 'socialist' President François Hollande from launching a war against Syria on the pretext of the laughable allegation that the Syrian Government had killed between 300 and 1,400 of its citizens with poison gas. Whilst evidence supporting that claim was non-existent, a body of evidence that implicated the U.S.-sponsored anti-government terrorists was growing day by day. In site of the lack of evidence and the sheer implausibility of the allegation that the Syrian Government, which even NATO admits, enjoys the support of 70% of Syrians, would attempt to murder its citizens, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Bob Carr were quick to give their strident support to President Barack Obama against Syria.

Fortunately, world public opinion, which had already been twice deceived by similar lying allegations against Iraq, saw through these lies and opposed the war. Opinion polls in the U.S. showed only 11% supported war. In the U.K., in response to overwhelming public opposition, the U.K. Parliament voted to not participate in the planned war. Over the following days, Francois François Hollande also decided not to participate in the planned war. left on his own and faced with overwhelming domestic opposition, President Barack Obama has decided to delay the war until after he has put his case to the U.S. Congress.

The likelihood that the 'evidence' that Obama and Kerry say they are going to present will stand up to the vast amount of evidence to the contrary is close to nil.

America Totally Discredited

Paul Craig Roberts, 30 August 2013

A foolish President Obama and moronic Secretary of State Kerry have handed the United States government its worst diplomatic defeat in history and destroyed the credibility of the Office of the President, the Department of State, and the entire executive branch. All are exposed as a collection of third-rate liars.

Intoxicated with hubris from past successful lies and deceptions used to destroy Iraq and Libya, Obama thought the US "superpower," the "exceptional" and "indispensable" country, could pull it off again, this time in Syria.

But the rest of the world has learned to avoid Washington's rush to war when there is no evidence. A foolish Obama was pushed far out on the limb by an incompetent and untrustworthy National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, and the pack of neoconservatives that support her, and the British Parliament cut the limb off.

What kind of fool would put himself in that vulnerable position?

Now Obama stands alone, isolated, trying to back away from his threat to attack without authorization from anyone--not from the UN, not from NATO, not from Congress who he ignored--a sovereign country. Under the Nuremberg Standard military aggression is a war crime. Washington has until now got away with its war crimes by cloaking them in UN or NATO approval. Despite these "approvals," they remain war crimes.

But his National Security Advisor and the neocon warmongers are telling him that he must prove that he is a Real Man who can stand alone and commit war crimes all by himself without orchestrated cover from the UN or NATO or a cowardly US Congress. It is up to Obama, they insist, to establish for all time that the President of the United States is above all law. He, and he alone is the "decider," the Caesar, who determines what is permissible. The Caesar of the "sole superpower" must now assert his authority over all law or Washington's hegemony over the world is lost.

As I noted in an earlier column today, if Obama goes it alone, he will be harassed for the rest of his life as a war criminal who dares not leave the US. Indeed, a looming economic collapse could so alter the power and attitude of the United States that Obama could find himself brought to justice for his war crimes.

Regardless, the United States government has lost its credibility throughout the world and will never regain it, unless the Bush and Obama regimes are arrested and put on trial for their war crimes.

Obama's destruction of US credibility goes far beyond diplomacy. It is likely that this autumn or winter, and almost certainly in 2014, the US will face severe economic crisis.

The long-term abuse of the US dollar's reserve currency role by the Federal Reserve and US Treasury, the never-ending issuance of new debt and printing of dollars to finance it, the focus of US economic policy on bailing out the "banks too big to fail" regardless of the adverse impact on domestic and world economies and holders of US Treasury debt, the awaiting political crisis of the unresolved deficit and debt ceiling limit that will greet Congress' return to Washington in September, collapsing job opportunities and a sinking economy all together present the government in Washington with a crisis that is too large for the available intelligence, knowledge, and courage to master.

When the proverbial hits the fan, the incompetent and corrupt Federal Reserve and the incompetent and corrupt US Treasury will have no more credibility than Obama and John Kerry.

The rest of the world--especially Washington's bullied NATO puppet states _{#fnSubj1" id="txtSubj1">1} --will take great delight in the discomfort of "the world's sole superpower" that has been running on hubris ever since the Soviet collapse.

The world is not going to bail out Washington, now universally hated, with currency swaps, more loans, and foreign aid. Americans are going to pay heavily for their negligence, their inattention, their unconcern, and their ignorant belief that nothing can go wrong for them and that anything that does is temporary.

Two decades of jobs offshoring has left the US with a third world labor force employed in lowly paid domestic nontradable services, a workforce comparable to India's of 40 years ago. Already the "world's sole superpower" is afflicted with a large percentage of its population dependent on government welfare for survival. As the economy closes down, the government's ability to meet the rising demands of survival diminishes. The rich will demand that the poor be sacrificed in the interest of the rich. And the political parties will comply.

Is this the reason that Homeland Security, a Nazi Gestapo institution, now has a large and growing para-military force equipped with tanks, drones, and billions of rounds of ammunition?

How long will it be before American citizens are shot down in their streets by "their" government as occurs frequently in Washington's close allies in Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain?

Americans have neglected the requirements of liberty. Americans are so patriotic and so gullible that all the government has to do is to wrap itself in the flag, and the people, or too many of them, believe whatever lie the government tells. And the gullible people will defend the government's lie to their death, indeed, to the death of the entire world.

If Americans keep believing the government's lies, they have no future. If truth be known, Americans have already lost a livable future. The neocons' "American Century" is over before it begun.

Update: I have heard from educated and aware friends that the presstitute media on the evening news are beating the drums for war. This shows what paid whores the US media is and their total disconnect from reality. Anyone who wastes their time on the US media is a brainwashed idiot, a danger to humanity.

Update 8:52 PM August 30: Is the White House idiot going to be a victim of his own careless presidential appointments?

Does he have no one to tell him how to escape the dilemma his moronic Secretary of State and National Security Advisor have put him in? Someone needs to tell the WH Fool that he must say that he accepts the conclusion of the world

community that there is not sufficient evidence for launching a military attack on Syria and killing even more people

than were killed in the alleged, but unproven, chemical attack, and that he awaits further and better evidence.

God help the moron and the unfortunate country that the fool represents.

#updates_3424" id="updates_3424">Appendix: Updates#frontPage_3424">↑

Why have were updates included in the first place? Why were they moved out of the teaser and into this appendix?. I was motivated to include so many updates, because I knew it was not possible to publish enough material, whether original or reposted, to inform readers about the Syrian conflict. One alternative was to link directly to news about Syria from the front page. However, this became unwieldy due to the large number of news items. As an alternative, visitors our now advised which are the most prominent web-sites carrying truthful news about the Syrian conflict on the #frontPage_3424">main front page.

Another goal was to show visitors links to deceitful mainstream media (other) web pages about Syria, so that they could be compared to the other articles, which are supported by evidence and logic (informative). The sites that lie about Syria include ABC News, the Age, SBS News, the Sydney Morning Herald and Rupert Murdoch's Australian (behind a paywall). - GT

Update, 23 June 2013 : Israeli Intelligence News: Syria Rebels Possess Chemical Weapons, US-NATO Delivering Heavy Weapons to the Terrorists on Global Research by Prof Michel Chossudovsky. (This article originally published 8 May 2013.)

See also: The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist of 14 June 2013 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky on Global Research.

The mainstream media, including the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) no longer disputes that the pretexts used to justify the United States' wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were lies. Yet, in spite of the appalling consequences, including as many as 3.3 million Iraqi deaths according to one recent estimate, the SBS has shown itself willing to echo a new series of lies, which have been contrived by the same people responsible for the Iraq War. This time the target is Syria.

The new set of lies are to justify their ongoing proxy terrorist war against Syria and, if they see it necessary, escalation to an all-out conventional invasion. That war has so far claimed 70,000 Syrian lives. In spite of this terrible human cost, the Syrian Governemnt and the Syrian Arab Army have still shown themselves to be capable of defending their country and of infliciting crushing defeats upon the terrorist killers.

Chemical warfare claims blamed on wrong side

The latest of many examples of lies used by the SBS against Syria are their reporting of claims by the United States that the Syrian Government has used chemical warfare against its own people. For many weeks now, the truth of from where the real threat of chemical attack has been understood by people prepared to look at the evidence. This includes alternative news services such as Global Research, Tony Caretalucci's landdestroyer.blogspot.com and the Corbett Report. That threat was not from the Syrian Government, which has nothing to gain by killing the same people who support it and have stood with it against the terrorists for more than two years. The threat of chemical warfare came from the terrorists.

Independent commission interviews many but finds no chemical weapons evidence against Syrian government

It was more recently confirmed by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria. As reported on PressTV and elsewhere:

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria could not find any evidence that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against militants, commission member Carla Del Ponte has said.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in television interview.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," said Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Undue prominence given to statements of disbelief from Whitehouse

In its news report of 6 May, the SBS gave prominence to the unfounded claims of US White House spokesman Jay Carney that the Syrian Government, and not its terrorist opponents, has used Chemical weapons. The effect of this report was to diminish the impact the more credible story of Carla Del Ponte's report, which was founded upon evidence, that the perpetrators of the chemical attack were the US-backed terrorists.

Tim Murray reports on a recent Canadian census and the public reaction in a voting poll to uncontrolled population growth. He asks why politicians seem to do the opposite of what the Canadian voters actually want.

Meanwhile Politicians And Media Clap and Environmentalists Remain Silent

In the wake of the just released Canadian Census Report, the Vancouver Province asked readers what they thought of continuing and rapid growth in their community.

83% said that either growth was "ruining" their communities or that growth "was not something they were crazy about".

That is 83% who said "No!" to growth.

Yet we have all four main federal political parties and all three provincial parties saying "Yes!". Yes, let's throw more coal into the furnace and keep our runaway growth train hurtling toward the cliff. Of course, there are some civic parties who want to "manage" growth by packing more and more people more and more tightly together. They even are so deceitful as to call this project "green". But how do you "green" a city by reducing per capita consumption, waste and land consumption while adding more and more newcomers? Cut consumption and waste in half but double the population? How much sense does that make? How much sense does it make to grow Canada's population by deliberate government policies? Does population growth make us wealthier? If it increases the GDP does it increase our PER CAPITA GDP?

If growth creates more jobs does it actually reduce the unemployment rate? If it expands the tax base does the extra tax revenue offset increased infrastructure costs of servicing more people?

If 80% of New Canadians are unskilled, do they earn a high enough income to pay the taxes necessary to offset the cost of social services they consume? If the answer is no, then what does that say about the commonplace belief that immigration is needed to "support the aged"? And what happens when the immigrants we accept to allegedly support the aged themselves become aged? Do we bring in yet more immigrants to support them? Canada already has the highest per capita intake of immigrants in the world (sorry Australia) and the highest population growth rate of all G8 countries. Do we increase this rate exponentially ad infinitum to chase the tail of increased tax revenue?

Do we need more and more immigration to fill the shortage of skilled labour so we can grow the economy? Does not a growing economy create even more skilled labour shortages? Are we sure that we need to import skilled labour? Have we taken a proper inventory of our labour requirements? Have we done enough to train our own youth, particularly Aboriginal youth, many of whom live on reserves with unemployment rates over 75%? Why do we seek foreign labour while we turn our backs on this vast untapped pool of potential talent, wasting away in despair and hopelessness?

Do we need population growth to grow the economy? And if continuing economic growth is desirable, or necessary, is it possible? What if advancing resource constraints make continuing economic growth IMPOSSIBLE? What if there are LIMITS TO GROWTH?

These are the questions that policy-makers and politicians won't answer. They won't answer because their jobs depend on avoiding the questions. And they are not the only ones who refuse to face the raging monster of growth.

Public silence about overpopulation in Canada is deafening

Do you hear that? Listen. Listen carefully. Do you recognize that sound? It is the sound of silence. No one is talking about growth, no one, that is, except those ordinary citizens who have had enough and cannot take it anymore, but whose complaints cannot get a hearing on the CBC or with any political party in Canada.

The public silence about growth in Canada is DEAFENING. And, oddly, when the topic of population growth threatens to make itself heard, the quietest place you would find in Canada would be in the offices and meeting rooms of Canada's mainstream environmental organizations------ who remain MUTE about the manifestly negative and massive ecological impact of our country's population explosion. Their silence is stunning given that over the last two decades, mass immigration has generated four times as much Green House Gass emissions and despoiled three times as much land as the Alberta oil sands project--- not boreal forest one might add, but for the most part, prime farmland.

Green apologies

Ah, but greens say, urban sprawl is not a function of population growth but "bad planning". The problem though, is that, to the contrary, on average half of sprawl is driven by population growth, 70% which in turn is driven by immigration. And since land-use planning is under the control of developer-controlled local councils, stopping sprawl must require stopping growth, not managing it. That is the raw reality that the talking heads of Green Inc. will not acknowledge.

The release of this latest Census report should have given the environmental establishment the opportunity to blow the whistle on the government's immigration policy. It would be the ideal "teachable moment" to restore "population" to the position it once held in the environmental discussion, and to resurrect the call for the development of a Population Plan for this nation. But once again, as happened in 2007, they have nothing to say. Not a word. Not a peep. Just what their corporate benefactors want to hear.

Tim Murray
February 14, 2012

Editorial: Yeah, we’re growing, but are we happy?

February 9, 2012. 2:50 pm • Section: Opinion http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/02/09/editorial-yeah-were-growing-but-are-we-happy

Should Greater Vancouver just keep growing until it resembles New York City? Is that what we all want? (MCT FILES)

Population figures from the 2011 Census didn’t tell us much that we didn’t know already, at least in a general sense. B.C. and its large, Lower Mainland communities are growing at a brisk clip.

The population of the province increased seven per cent from 2006 to 2011 — above the national average of 5.9 per cent. Some 4.4 million of us now call B.C. home.

Lower Mainland communities expanded even faster:

Surrey’s population grew by 18.6 per cent, downtown Vancouver grew by 11 per cent, with Burnaby (10 per cent), Coquitlam (10.4), New Westminster (12.7) and Port Moody (20.0) showing big population gains.

Developers, who stand to profit, and most politicians, who equate population growth with success and more power, champion all growth as wonderful. And while it’s true that growth means jobs and greater economic activity, it also means more crowded communities, more traffic, greater pressure on public facilities, higher costs on local government to provide services, and usually higher housing costs.

How dense we want our communities to become, and to what extent we should preserve current neighbourhoods, are questions in a discussion that all citizens should join. VOTE:

Thank you for voting!

. . . fantastic, and creating much more dynamic and interesting communities. 6.52% (6 votes)

. . . OK, I guess. 3.26% (3 votes)

. . . not something I'm crazy about. 19.57% (18 votes)

. . . ruining our communities. I wish I could live elsewhere. 63.04% (58 votes)

. . . inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it. 7.61% (7 votes)

Total Votes: 92

[Editor: More have voted since this article was written.]

Comments (2)

· Citizen of the West - 3 days ago

The answer is NO we should not keep going until we resemble New York as your editorial asks. The beauty of the Vancouver and BC that I grew up in is the laid back quiet beauty, not the expensive, densified unfamiliar place we are starting to become. We are told to expect another million people in the next couple of decades or so. They told Toronto that also, and then they got a million more, and another million .... you get the picture.

· http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/87d0cbea244e1ca8482de11c35b5135b?s=54&d=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.poll.fm%2Fimages%2Fno-user-54.png%3Fs%3D54

TruthandJustice - 3 days ago

If anyone actually believes that such high immigration is necessary they are very naive. No other country with a similar birthrate has experienced such massive changes. When did we ask for our communities to become concrete jungles and for us long time residents to become alienated? Such change is unnerving.

The producers of Q and A have their favourites when it comes to “thinktanks”, with the free marketeering IPA topping the list with 4 different panellists and 11 appearances in total (not including appearances by former staff members). Meanwhile, prominent progressive think tank The Australia Institute has never featured on Q&A, despite TAI’s current head Dr Richard Denniss debating Lord Christopher Monckton about climate change at the National Press Club last year and its former head being prominent author and intellectual Professor Clive Hamilton.`````

The national broadcaster promotes the show as being “adventures in democracy”, but according to a new study by Independent Australia, if ABC’s popular Q&A programme set electoral boundaries, it would produce a worse gerrymander than Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland.

The study, which details every guest on the current affairs panel show hosted by Tony Jones Q&A since its inception in 2008, shows an overwhelming preponderance of guests from Sydney and a very low proportion from Western Australia, Queensland and regional centres.

Figure 1:

In addition to being focussed on NSW, where Q&A is usually produced, the study shows that the programme uses an extremely narrow range of talent. For instance, out of the 680 panellists appearing since the show began, only 345 different individuals have appeared — an average of almost two shows per guest. This average is bumped up because some guests have been on the program up to 13 times, including tonight’s guest Tanya Plibersek, despite only being a junior minister until December 2011. (Another guest appearing tonight, Malcolm Turnbull, will be making his twelfth appearance on the show. Note Figure 2.)

Figure 2:

Independent Australia found that many prominent Australians, including Don Henry from the Australian Conservation Foundation and former Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr Helen Caldicott, have never been asked to appear on Q&A.

“I’ve never been asked and would like to be,” Dr Caldicott told Independent Australia in an exclusive interview. “I find it somewhat stimulating, but a limited range of topics is discussed.”

The research shows that the show is relatively even-handed in presenting voices from the two major parties, but seldom includes panellists representing minor parties.
It appears that the producers have their favourites when it comes to “thinktanks”, with the free marketeering IPA topping the list with 4 different panellists and 11 appearances in total (not including appearances by former staff members). Meanwhile, prominent progressive think tank The Australia Institute has never featured on Q&A, despite TAI’s current head Dr Richard Denniss debating Lord Christopher Monckton about climate change at the National Press Club last year and its former head being prominent author and intellectual Professor Clive Hamilton.

“As the director of Australia’s largest progressive think tank I am sure the producers of Q&A will have me on one day,” said Dr Denniss in a statement provided to Independent Australia.

“Given the Institute’s research into the impact of the mining boom, climate change, tax reform, superannuation and the role of government in the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine they don’t think we’d have something to say about the big issues.”

The author of the study, Independent Australia managing director David Donovan, says the ABC is letting down the public by its narrow focus and may be in breach of its own Charter and Code of Practice.

“The ABC, by focussing on the same few people, mainly from the two major parties, is not presenting a full range of views,” said Mr Donovan.

“And by focusing on such a narrow range of people and views in such a popular and important current affairs show, Q&A is in danger of breaching its own code of ethics and charter,” he said.

“The ABC Code of Practice says it has a duty to provide balance, impartiality and a diversity of views, however based on the responses I have received from Q&A producers – which will be included in the final report – they appear to be more concerned about providing entertainment.”

“They seem to see Q&A as a sort of modern Australian Punch and Judy show.”

“Of course, entertainment is one of the objectives specified in the ABC Charter, but it is mentioned in that document after the aims of providing a sense of national identity and informing.”

“Also mentioned in that Charter is the need to reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, which appears doubtful in this program from its focus on voices from Sydney and Adelaide at the expense of voices from WA, Queensland and regional centres.”

“Far from being an exercise in democracy, Q&A more like an autocracy that bestows patronage upon its favourites.”

The research and report is due to be published on the Independent Australia website later today.

COMMENT: David Donovan, [email protected], 0403 237 880

Independent Australia
'The journal of democracy and independent thought'
MEDIA RELEASE
12 March, 2012

Despite the near daily news coverage of many poor countries suffering conflict and disaster, critical, underlying issues are almost never mentioned by journalists reporting endless symptoms and predicaments. The issues covered in this article add insight into the key development challenges facing the countries concerned and, by implication, the policies of countries like the US, UK, Australia and Canada, where billions are being spent in aid and military interventions to try and stabilise failing states.

To News editors: Raising news awareness on driving forces behind failing states

Click on picture for film from the Population Media Center - http://www.populationmedia.org

By Brian McGavin, writer and analyst. August 2011.

Below I give some interesting and generally unreported facts that provide important background on many of the failing states regularly in the news. For example, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestinian Territory and Afghanistan. It also includes Pakistan and Iran.

Despite the near daily news coverage of these countries, critical, underlying issues are almost never mentioned by journalists reporting endless symptoms and predicaments. These issues add a great deal of insight into the key development challenges facing the countries concerned and by implication the policies of countries like the US, UK and Canada, where billions are being spent in aid and military interventions to try and stabilise failing states.

The aim is to give journalists more balance and context to reports. A simple one or two-sentence addition of data gives a far better understanding of the significance of demographics to a country’s geo-political profile, its aid dependency and social and economic future.
(See table below*)

Through 2011 we have seen almost daily coverage of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and armed conflict. While some underlying factors of high youth unemployment, rising food prices, water shortages and fears of growing Islamic fundamentalism are mentioned, the media has decidedly not focused on the troubling demographic realities the Middle East and other crisis-ridden countries face. Good news coverage is not just about immediate events, but fundamental causal symptoms. Here are some examples.

1) Egypt. Hardly any mention has been made of the large and rapidly growing population of Egypt, its extremely small arable land area of just 3 per cent, food imports of 40 per cent and the total dependence now on food imports and aid to sustain the population.

Egypt’s population almost quadrupled in just 60 years, from 21 million in 1950 to 81 million in 2010 and at its current 1.8 per cent annual increase in population, the population could hit 150 million before 2050, unless the birth rate declines. (UNPD data). Consider the potential for endless and costly food aid and the rapidly growing numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people attracted to violence and extremism.

2) Afghanistan. On December 23, 2009, UK Channel 4 TV news ran a 20-minute lead on selling children and kidnapping people in Afghanistan. The father selling two of his children was portrayed as a ‘victim’ of poverty in being unable to feed or care for his family. The size of his family was not mentioned – but he had a lot of children.

The reporter asked what would happen to the child and was told it was an opportunity for a better education, but no more was asked about the child’s fate. Various ‘experts’ including Joe Klein of the New York Times and the CEO of Oxfam UK were asked for their view. Corruption, poverty and criminality were discussed, but what was not mentioned was the country’s demographic trajectory that would add a great deal of context to the discussion.

The UK Guardian newspaper on 14/9/10 ran a four-page spread on progress in Afghanistan towards meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The prognosis was gloomy, but in all this verbiage, there was just one minor mention of a 'rising population in Afghanistan' as one of several environmental factors that may see the country not being able to produce enough food to feed its people. In fact, several interesting factors were mentioned in the article, but does any of this important information get covered in the almost daily news reports of more coalition troops being flown home in coffins?

Among the largely unreported gems was that remaining forests were being chopped down for firewood; water shortages and contamination was growing, with thousands of hungry people fleeing the countryside to cities - particularly Kabul, which at 5m people is now the fastest growing capital city in the world. It is also one of the only capital cities without a proper sewage system. Yet Coalition forces have spent years and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in the country without these issues being reported in mainstream media.

3) Haiti, like many of the poorest countries in the world, has one of the lowest per person consumption footprints in the world. In Spring 2010 a world-wide media bonanza descended on the earthquake-stricken island, bringing daily live reports of a human disaster: Almost 98 percent of the forests cut down; raw sewage flushing into the ocean; large-scale illiteracy; lack of fresh water, and not enough food for an island on permanent food aid.

But the media reports never mentioned this was happening on an island that possesses the carrying capacity for perhaps 500,000 people, but the culture of Haiti and the Catholic Church ‘encouraged’ it to grow to over 10 million and counting. Haiti has already wrecked much of its ecological assets and relies on exporting people to USA, Canada, the neighbouring Dominican Republic and even the Bahamas as a safety valve for its extreme population pressures.

US Census Bureau records give the legal Haitian population in the United States exceeding 850,000. In Canada the Haitian diaspora is estimated to be around 1 million. There are also estimated to be over 800,000 illegal Haitians living in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which accounts for about 10% of its national population. (Wikipedia).

While an increase of rape cases has been mentioned in some news reports since the disaster, a reproductive health survey, conducted by UNFPA Haiti in October 2010, found that the fertility rate in urban areas has tripled from four per cent to 12 per cent. But this was never mentioned in on-going media coverage of the disaster or in NGO aid appeals.

4) In Gaza, around 1.5 million people are crammed onto an arid strip of land 40km (25 miles) long and 6 to 12km wide. Many people live in poverty, with unemployment at 45 percent in late 2010, one of the highest in the world according to the UN. The population has grown by 40 per cent in the past 10 years and is rising by about 5% every year. It is expected to double by 2030 – with family sizes of eight or more not unusual.

5) In Libya, repeated stories of ‘refugees’ - alternatively described as ‘migrant workers’ trying to leave the country were shown on TV, many of them sub-Saharan Africans. What was not reported is that an estimated one in six of Libya’s population is made up of illegal sub-Saharan immigrants trying to reach Europe. Italy eventually paid the Libyan Government to help stop them moving on to Italy. With the chaos, where are these illegal residents heading now, aided by International Refugee Agencies and how did the Libyan Government suddenly acquire so many sub-Saharan mercenaries to brutally attack its own people?[1]

6) Pakistan. The media spent weeks looking at the late 2010 disaster in Pakistan, where one-fifth of the country was flooded by the Indus River. But you don’t hear any information that Pakistan is housing 174 million people on a flood plain and at its current birth-rate the population is set to more than double over the next forty years. That ‘core’ challenge never crosses the lips of CNN, NPR, NBC or the BBC.

7) In Yemen, a nation of 22 million and rising rapidly, grain production has fallen by two thirds over the last 20 years and 19 of Yemen’s 21 aquifers are severely stressed. Yemen now imports 89 per cent of the food it needs according to a recent EU report. World Bank projections say the area around the capital, San’a’ - home to 2 million people and one of the world’s fastest growing cities, may be pumped dry in a few years.

In October, we will have seven billion people in the world. I am sure you will agree that these core issues on huge challenges we are facing need to be brought fully to the public's attention. I hope you will cascade this information round your teams and let me know. I can add much more.

Sincerely,

Brian McGavin,
(UK-based writer, geo-political and environmental analyst)

*The UNPD 2010 population data gives population in 1950, 2010 and projected in 2050 and current average number of births per woman (total fertility rate TFR). The table also shows the potential self-sufficiency or bio-reserve deficit exposure for these countries, taken from the Ecological Footprint Atlas 2010 (appendix F, Table 1) - based on most recent 2007 data.

• Bio-capacity reserves or deficits are in global hectares (gha) per person. Plus (+) is current reserve bio-capacity. Minus (-) is a biocapacity deficit. (Rounded to nearest decimal and percentage).
• Climate change impacts will likely increase pressure on many countries’ bio-capacity.
• The 2010 UNPD population data shows ‘medium variant’ estimates of population growth This assumes an often quoted presumption that total fertility rates will fall to the lower levels of many developed countries and the population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 and then hold steady. (2.1 children is replacement fertility). So far, this shows little sign of happening in most African countries and many areas of the Middle East.
• If the global Total Fertility Rate continues at its current path, population projections will be far higher and the impact on people and the planet in just 39 years will be immense. (See the constant fertility projection in the table). A UN news release issued on March 11, 2009 warned that if fertility rates don’t fall, the medium variant projection of around 9.3 billion people by 2050 would instead rise to 11.1 billion people by 2050. In addition, many developed countries are now offering ‘baby bonuses’ to increase their populations.
• Projections for 2100* are shown for Nigeria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to demonstrate the frightening demographic position in the lifetime of many of our children if current birth rates persist. (Rounded to nearest million).
• Because Pakistan has not conducted a census since 1998, the country’s population size is conjectural. The government estimates the 2010 figure at about 175 million people, while the United Nations believes the number is around 185 million.

The Washington-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB) latest 2011 data shows more pessimistic projections on fertility decline in many developing countries, so they use the High Variant projection. Note PRB’s 2050 projections for Nigeria, at 433m as against UNPD 390m and Pakistan at 314m as against UNPD 275m.

[1] Ed. The remark about Libya is based on a perspective contested in some quarters, e.g. global research and ”candobetter.net – libya”, due to the lack of objective evidence for Gaddafi attacking his own people, their apparent willingness to defend him, and the conspicuous motives of the US, the UK and France to preserve first-world hegemony in the oil-producing region against China and coalitions of the third world with Gaddafi, the brilliant originator of OPEC in the 1970s.

It is surprising to pick up a book about wealth statistics and find that it segues so readily into another about psychopathology in young girls. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone takes a revealing look at how wealth is distributed within different developed countries and Reviving Ophelia illustrates the decline of women's rights in the face of aggressive pornography and its effect on girls. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

Some people are more equal than others, especially if they are not women

In the Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011, Deidre Macken writes, “After a week when economic statistics made a lie of our feelings of being worse off, it seems like an opportunistic time to check how good we are at reading ourselves. Obviously we are not good judges at assessing our economic well-being. Repeat after me – we are a lucky people, living in a country that’s never been luckier.”[1]

Without going into the adequacy of the indicators she used but does not reference, was Deidre talking about averaged statistics or was she talking about the way they are distributed throughout the nation?

I chose a quote from a female financial journalist to introduce the feminist implications of the theories of two books. One was published nearly two decades ago and the other was published last year. The earlier one is by Mary Pipher, with the title of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. It was published by Riverhead Books, New York, 1994. The second book is by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It’s title is The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, and it was published by Penguin in 2010.

Both books are about the impacts of inequality as you and I experience it, rather than the global economics of inequality between different countries by which the first and the third world are often defined. I found these books interesting particularly in the light of the recent inquiry into human rights in Australia, which ignored Australian citizens’ rights by concentrating on international rights. Citizens’ rights require active democracy and laws to facilitate this, whereas global human rights are relative abstractions, requiring recognition by national governments in hard-to-enforce treaties.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is better for everyone

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin 2010 beg the question of defining countries as rich or poor according to their average wealth. The book points out that, although Australia or the United States might have relatively large GDPs for their total populations, large sections of those societies are politically, materially, socially and physically disempowered and disadvantaged by their relative poverty. The authors imply that these differences drive seriously negative outcomes in almost any area you care to think of. The more unequal you are with the people geographically close to you – in your neighbourhood, your state, your nation - the more anxious and dysfunctional you are likely to be. Inequality is actually an indicator of relative unhappiness and that unhappiness is linked to many social and physical ills, including violence and obesity.

Further on we will relate the lesser condition of women as a subclass within these unequal nations.

Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that, rather than comparing “rich countries with poor countries” we should compare rich countries and then look inside them to see how well they are actually looking after their people.

Within countries like Japan and some of the Scandinavian countries … the richest 20 per cent of people are less than four times as rich as the poorest 20 per cent of people. At the bottom of the [scale] are countries in which these differences are at least twice as big, including two in which the richest 20 per cent get about nine times as much as the poorest. Among the most unequal are Singapore, USA, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. (p.16-17)

The book makes no attempt to explain why Portugal should stand out in such a contrast to its continental European neighbours, which almost invariably outperform English speaking countries on equality and social conditions. I would suggest however that one reason lies in Portugal's inheritance laws, which reflect a tendency to disinherit children in favour of spouses, similar to English-style laws. In the other European countries roman-style civil codes provide for children before spouses equally, therefore men and woman come to adulthood with similar wealth.

Wilkinson and Pickett find that the countries with the worst social inequality have the worst social outcomes overall in health, violence, obesity, illiteracy, mental illness, addiction, and rates of teenage pregnancy.

The official message is that developed western countries have done their duty by their own populations in fulfilling their material needs, leaving a remaining task of bringing the poor of other countries up to the same material standard. It seems churlish of people in those first world populations to reproach the rich in their countries for ostentatious and dishonest living, while the poor in the third world suffer malnutrition and disease. The official message is really that the poor of the developed world need to put the needs of the poor of the undeveloped world ahead of theirs, rather than to exert their own rights locally. The normalization of competitiveness over cooperation and social trust is a strategy to justify the growing vast internal inequalities in the first world.

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

Female obesity linked to inequality

Most women would be interested to know that the authors, Wilkinson and Pickett, are able to find a clear association between inequality, obesity and the female sex.

The World Health Organisation has found, from a study begun in the 1980s, that in the 26 countries it surveyed, rates of obesity have increased more among poor women than rich women. The countries with the worst inequalities – Australia, the United States, Portugal and the UK, also have the worst rates of obesity. The countries with the lowest rates of inequality have the lowest rates of obesity.(p.98)

Observing a relationship between anxiety and material and social inequality, the authors note that chronic stress stimulates the hormone, cortisol, of which high levels are associated with deposits of fat around the middle.(p.95) People with this kind of fat are at higher risk of other illnesses – notably diabetes. Diabetes is itself associated with depression.

The authors also refer to the concept of the ‘thrifty phenotype’ where birth weights are lower in women who have experienced stress during pregnancy. Are low-birth weight babies likely to squirrel away extra calories because the stress they encountered in utero led them to prepare for a harsh society, where they would expect to struggle for food? Instead, although they do grow up in a harsh society, it is a non-traditional variety where food remains plentiful but love and approval are at a premium. (p.98)

The book also notes that food may stimulate the brain in the same way as addictive drugs do in people who use food addictively. That is, that food may be used as a pain-killer. (p.96)

It is probably obvious that food marketing may also have a role in obesity, but what is that role? The authors find associations between eating for comfort and homely foods which remind people of childhood, but they note that fast food outlets aim to reassure and to provide the lower classes with a feeling of social mobility. They reassure through their reliability and clean surroundings, but they also provide an affordable opportunity to dine out, which was once the province of the rich. Of course when you dine out on fast food, you are taking in huge amounts of calories in the form of fats and sugars, to a degree not found in haute cuisine restaurants.(p.96)

The book also refers to a study which related obesity to people’s subjective sense of ranking low in the social pecking order. That is, how you feel you compare is more important than your absolute living standard.(p.101)

To recapitulate, this book is about how, once the basics are present, absolute living standard is outweighed by social ranking as measured by relative living standard.

Women as a sub-class within unequal first world nations

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

In Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls, (Riverhead Books, New York, 1994) the subject is also about inequality and anxiety within high GDP, purportedly progressive societies. Despite the rhetoric, she argues, girls receive a consistent message that they don’t deserve equal treatment and must go to outlandish lengths for mere acceptance. For this reason the whole basis of their identities become at risk as they identify as women rather than as children. They learn that their psychological identities depend on the approval of men. This explains the very high rates of anorexia and risky lifestyles among young women seeking some control over their social and personal environments.

Harking back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet as a young woman who lost the approval of the important males in her life and then suicided, this book observes the increasing difficulty since the 1980s that adolescent girls and the women they become have in preserving a sense of self and self-worth as they transition between childhood and maturity. It finds that they are victims of an increasingly sexualized and pornographic society that defines them almost exclusively as sexual objects, despite the official rhetoric of women’s rights. The girls feel the need to justify themselves against these media popularized and reinforced social standards and, in doing so, to suppress their real feelings and ambitions.

The author observes that, whilst her 1960s generation grew into a western society where the Women’s Liberation movement had overturned official institutional barriers to women’s rights to career, property and political candidacy, the mainstream media preserved, then enhanced over the next decades, a picture of women as inherently less-deserving of these rights than men. Unglamorous, older women (the majority) rarely receive attention in the mass media, and beautiful women often seem only to deserve violent attention, as victims of elaborate predator screenplays. Women are increasingly bombarded by this kind of view at younger and younger ages.

This book, Reviving Ophelia, was published in 1994, at a time when the pervasiveness of the internet was in its relative infancy. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

How does a girl, as her sexual personality awakens deal with the saturation marketing of femaleness as moronic and deserving of punishment and death? Mary Pipher argues that girl’s personalities die and that they often die with their personalities.

”Ironically, bright and sensitive girls are most at risk for problems. They are likely to understand the implications of the media around them and be alarmed. They have the mental equipment to pick up our cultural ambivalence about women, and yet they don’t have the cognitive, emotional and social skills to handle this information. They are paralyzed by complicated and contradictory data that they cannot interpret. They struggle to resolve the unresolvable and to make sense of the absurd. It’s this attempt to make sense of the whole of adolescent experience that overwhelms bright girls.

Less perceptive girls may miss the meaning of sexist ads, music and shows entirely. They tend to deny and oversimplify problems. They don’t attempt to integrate aspects of their experience or to ‘connect the dots’ between cultural events and their own lives. Rather than process their experience, they seal in confusion.

Often bright girls look more vulnerable than their peers who have picked up less or who have chosen to deal with all the complexity by blocking it out. Later, bright girls may be more interesting, adaptive and authentic, but in early adolescence they just look shelled.

Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed, or get angry. Whether girls feel depression or anger is a matter of attribution – those who blame themselves feel depressed, while those who blame others feel angry. Generally they blame their parents. Of course, most girls react with some combination of the four general ways.” (p. 43.)

Girls deal with painful thoughts, discrepant information and cognitive confusion in ways that are true or false to the self. The temptation is to shut down, to oversimplify, to avoid the hard work of examining and integrating experiences. Girls who operate from a false self often reduce the world to a more manageable place by distorting reality. Some girls join cults in which others do all their thinking for them. Some girls become anorexic and reduce all the complexity in life to just one issue – weight.” (p.61)

Mary Pipher observes that the loss of confidence in themselves that girls experience as they mature sexually occurs just at the time when more confidence is required to tackle increasingly complex work in the later years of school. Because of this socially-induced lack of confidence, even some highly intelligent girls will give up at the first sign of difficulty, where less bright male students will persist.

The book contains many succinct case histories and concludes with useful ways to approach these problems.

Male treatment of this subject - Turning Angel

How do men deal with these realities that affect their daughters, mothers and intimates so badly? In conclusion, I will mention a book by a man exploring these themes. spirit-level.jpg by novelist, Greg Iles, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2006) is a highly readable thriller that dramatises the stresses of the normalization of sexism and pornography on young girls [and men] in their last years of high school and the particular vulnerability of highly intelligent young women from dysfunctional homes. Iles looks at the temptation for upwardly mobile professional men to exploit such young women. It is also well worth a read and testifies to the continuing usefulness of the novel as a medium for social comment as well as entertainment.

NOTES

[1] Deidre Macken, “I’m starting with the man in the mirror,” Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011.

The problem with Mr Murdoch's newspaper empire is not just unethical behaviour by his journalists. It goes much deeper. With the alarming concentration of media ownership in Australia and the advent of PR driven journalism, for the sake of democracy, the public must support independent media. David Donovan of Independent Australia comments.

Australian mass media is concentrated into the hands of a very small number of proprietors. For example, 11 of the 12 major newspapers in Australia are owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation or John Fairfax Holdings. In fact, Murdoch bestrides the Australian media landscape like a colossus—NewsCorp owns 8 of that 12, and also dominate the regional and suburban newspaper publishing industry, as well as owning a major slice of Foxtel.

(Image: Rupert Murdoch, courtesy Rex Interstock) Sign this online petition advocating a comprehensive Inquiry into the Australian media industry. #AusPol http://fb.me/18xDXIEuv 1 day ago

The Australian people have less different voices to use upon which to make their decisions than almost any other place in the free world. And Rupert Murdoch is happy to wield his overwhelming power.

In 1979, as Murdoch looked to acquire Channel 10 in Melbourne, the Australian Journalists Association in a submission to the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal alleged that Murdoch was an autocratic and unprincipled proprietor who demanded that his lackeys publish distorted accounts of the news when it suited him. There is an abundance of evidence to support this view. Whether this is true or not, where one proprietor owns such a large swathe of the Australian media industry, the danger of interference in our democracy is present and clear.

Despite Australian media ownership being amongst the most concentrated in the world, at the behest of powerful proprietors, successive Australian Governments have gradually further relaxed media ownership rules. The most recent round was put in place in April 2007 under the Howard Government, where the new ‘two out of three’ rule meant that companies are now allowed to own up to two media outlets – television, radio and newspaper – in a single area.

The reason given for the change by the then Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, was that convergence in the media industry as a result of news technologies, particularly the internet, meant that the old regime was ineffective. Newspaper proprietors were now able to transmit video and audio material on their websites, and broadcasters were able to transmit text in the same way. Coonan also said that the advent of “new players” as a result of the internet – the so-called “independent media” meant that there was a new diversity voices in the media landscape, making cross ownership laws largely needless.

“Traditional media services are being challenged by new digital technologies and this is resulting in the emergence of new players, new content and new platforms,” Senator Coonan said in 2006.

Despite digital technologies, mass media still overwhelmingly influential

Unfortunately, the idea that mass media diversity doesn’t matter, and that new players are threatening traditional sources is largely mythical.

Influential political blogger with US website The Nation, John Nicholls, said in Australia last year that, despite the new “players”, “content” and “platforms”, people have never received less information and less of it from alternative sources.

Nicholls offered some troubling facts about journalism in the US, where there is far more diversity of mass media ownership than we have in Australia. He said that rather than offering a diversity of voices, individual journalists were typically obliged to produce content on a range of platforms—video, audio and print. With owners having radio, TV and newspaper interests, this meant less journalists were required—a clear cost-benefit for proprietors. According to Nicholls, there are less journalists now there was in the time of President Franklin D Roosevelt and there were more journalists covering Reagan’s inauguration than Obama’s.

Rather than the new platforms leading to a diversity of voices, voices are in fact being snuffed out. Nicholls called this decline in journalism a “crisis of democracy”.

But, you might ask, as we hear less voices from the main players, isn’t independent media filling the gap?

The answer, says Nicholls, is generally no.

In January 2010, the Pew Centre of Journalism’s published a report detailing a study in which had analysed the way people get their information in the US city of Baltimore. The results were conclusive—people still get most of their information from “traditional” media sources. An analysis of independent media – or “blogs” as they are sometimes known – showed that 96 per cent of stories simply came from recycling stories found in the mainstream press. However, the study also showed that the mainstream press was producing 73 per cent less information than 10 years ago.

In other words, despite us getting almost all our information from traditional sources, these sources are producing less new stories than ever before.

And where are most these stories coming from? With the extra demands placed on the dwindling number of main-stream journalists, they are increasingly reaching for stage managed events and press releases to create their stories. Pew reported that a staggering 86 per cent of stories were produced by power, with only 14% of stories resulting from actual journalism—research, investigation, interviewing sources, digging, et al.

We get most of our news from PR companies. Whilst journalism has declined, career opportunities within the public relations industry have boomed. In 1970, the ratio of PR officers to journalists was 1:1. In 1980, it stretched to 1.2 PR people to every journalist. Now, we see an eye-watering 4:1 disparity. It has reached the point where we now see PR companies producing fully edited news stories that are shown on commercial media networks in their entirety, without any notification to viewers or listeners that this is pure spin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nichols_%28journalist%29

Democracy is at stake, but the people in power aren’t listening because they are very happy with the way they can easily dominate the news cycle. Pew’s research showed that 63 per cent of stories came directly from Government officials.

Nicholls says “democracy is at stake” and this seems no exaggeration.

Why don’t new media produce more new stories?

It all comes down to money. Good journalism takes time, effort and money—something that is in short supply in the world of Independent media. Here at Independent Australia, we are determined to buck this trend and produce new stories—stories you won’t have seen elsewhere.

In the past week, brilliant IA journalist Tess Lawrence, broke a story on Interpol and the Julian Assange red notice that has been published all around the world. However, despite been personally sent by IA to every mass media organisation in Australia, giving them full permission to publish, with the exception of a single brave broadcaster, Murray Peters from 2ST, none have seen fit to cover the story. We understand why—they would like to ignore us and stifle our voice. The last thing the mass media want in this country is competition after they have fought so hard, over so long, to so successfully eliminate it.

ATTRIBUTIONS AND NOTES

Source of this article: Independent Australia
Originally posted On Monday, 14 Mar 2011

The article has been republished, with permission.

In its initial context at Independent Australia the article concluded,

"But, though we are small, we are growing very quickly. This website is doubling in new readers about every two months. With our new revamped website format, our commitment to breaking stories you won’t have seen anywhere else, and with your support, we will keep on growing.

But we do need your support. As we said, good journalism is takes time and is expensive. If you would like to help us create quality Australian journalism, please donate generously to our website. And if you can’t afford to do that, just make sure you keep on reading us and giving is your feedback.

Help us keep democracy alive in this great country."

The Editor at candobetter.net inserted the following heading: "Despite digital technologies, mass media still overwhelmingly influential"

This article explores why Australians are so frustrated with the lack of deep thinkers and serious policy makers in our political establishment. It asks why politicians only discuss peripheral issues and never seriously address homelessness. It comments on some recent flagrantly anti-democratic political acts, including the way LNP leadership has been hired out to Cambell Newman in Queensland. In the spirit of relocalisation, it offers some insights into local power in China.

One only need browse through recent events in Australian politics (Federal and State) over the last few months to understand why Australians are so frustrated with the lack of deep thinkers and serious policy makers in our political establishment.

In normal times, with a booming world economy, despite widespread incompetency in political leadership, Australia, blessed by its natural resources, has been able to flow along with the world trend of economic prosperity. Therefore the issue of political incompetency within our current system of government has not been sufficiently alarming to affect the livelihood of the average person on the streets. For example, Australia can simply ride on the wave of the Chinese boom, to go by these examples: "China the focus of our fortunes" (WA Today, 27 Dec 2010) and "Good year ahead for investors, depending on China" (The Australian, 29 Dec 2010)

Global connections; global problems

The world, however, has become so inter-connected that some problems are beyond our control. An event taking place in one part of the world can negatively impact upon the rest of the world. One such event was the global financial crisis ignited by the United States in 2008, which impacted in the subsequent global inflation. This global crisis was due partly to the then US President Bush’s and now Obama’s administration so-called ‘Quantitative Easing Monetary Policy.’ Plainly speaking, this is a money printing policy. This policy caused the world to be flooded with hot money and a depreciating US dollar. (Money Market, 25 Oct 2010 - "Is the US. Federal Reserve Setting the Stage for Hyperinflation?"

There are of course many other international factors that resulted in inflation beyond our control. These include:

1) The US administration's irresponsible policy in the sudden converting of 35 per cent of US corn into biofuel without taking into consideration the immediate impact to the rest of the world due to:

a) US exports accounting for about 60 per cent of the world's corn supply, hence a sudden shortage in supply of 35% of corn from US into the market caused the price to go up.

b) Many livestock farmers use corn to feed their livestock. Hence, inflation on meat and meat related products as well.

As a result, the Independent UK (23 march 2011) reported a complaint by Nestlé boss with a heading: "Biofuel policy is causing starvation, says Nestlé boss".

2) The recent mass protests across the Middle East and North Africa have also got to do with inflation in food price and daily necessities. The political turmoil in the oil rich regions fuels inflation across the world on another front with a surge in oil price, which affects the cost of transport, electricity and everything else.

3) Other factors also cause inflation, such as the appreciation of Chinese currency and labour cost. Corporate greed is also a key reason.

While the Treasurer claims credit on economic figures, can you find any politician commenting on the following topics?

Whilst our politician, Treasurer Wayne Swan, was quick to claim credit for the latest unemployment figures (Herald Sun, 10 April 2011 - "'Australia's jobless rate envy of world,' Treasurer Wayne Swan says", no politician (from government, opposition, minor parties or independents) seemed to want to comment on any of the following sets of figures over the last few months:

1) One in five Australians struggling with debt repayments," (Herald Sun, 7 April 2011)
2) "Shock rise in mortgage default cases," (News Limited, 28 March 2011)
3) "Australians raid superannuation to avoid home loss – it is as bad as it gets," (The Australian, 9 April 2011)

4) "Private rental too much for many families" (The Age, 29 March 2011)
5) "Going up and up - living costs outstrip the CPI, latest figures reveal," (Daily Telegraph, 15 Feb 2011)
6) "Rise in middle-class bankrupts," (WA Today, 24 May 2010)
7) "Health insurance hike double inflation rate," (News Limited, 25 Feb 2011)

8) "Construction sector shrinks again as federal stimulus winds up," (Construction News, 7 Dec 2010)
9) "Australians crippled by tax burden," (News Limited, 7 Mar 2011) where the tax office raises the following issues: “Documents show 4.3 million individual taxpayers have "not yet lodged" a tax return for 2008-09 - a staggering 26 per cent increase on 3.4 million in the previous year” and “About 700,000 taxpayers entered into special repayment plans with the Tax Office in 2009-10 - an increase of 32 per in four years.”

Homelessness in Australia

The reality on the ground is that, instead of having 105,000 homeless across the country during the "2006 ABS counting," the latest figure reported 4 years later by the ABC (30 April 2010) has become "1 in 100 homeless in past year." That is, the number of homeless in Australia has being more than doubled within 3 years since the last count in 2006. The problem is so serious that, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “as many as 80 per cent of new applications for temporary housing by couples with children cannot be met on a daily basis.” The report also indicated that “of the total new requests for housing, 62 per cent of people were turned away, a rate stable with previous years”. (Brisbane Times, 22 July 2010 - "Homeless families are being turned away’."

Any solutions and policies announcement by our political ‘Elites’?

From their complete silence in response to these news items, it would appear that none of our politicians have a solution or have any understanding of the actual causes of the problems. Otherwise, based on our political culture, somebody would have jumped in front of the media to give themselves some free publicity.

In a time of massive poverty and suffering, this is what our politicians do:

1) One of our independent MPs who holds the balance of power in the minority government - Andrew Wilkie - threatened to bring down the Gillard government over pokey game reform. (Herald Sun, 30 March 2011 - "Wilkie threatens PM over pokie reform." Andrew has won a seat in Tasmania with a tiny margin by campaigning against pokey games. It seems that the issue of pokey reform seems to have taken up most, if not all of his time since he got into the federal parliament 8 months ago.

2) Our former Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd appears to be still bitter over being dumped by his comrades months before the last election. He has been acting as a lone ranger against his own party with virtually no or little contact with Prime Minister Julie Gillard and other cabinet ministers.

Immediately after his dumping as Prime Minister, he began to make use of his previous status and “upsetting Labor insiders by holding high-level talks in the US (and the UN) even though he is now just a backbencher” (News Limited, 16 July 2010 - "Kevin Rudd's one-man show haunts Julia Gillard." He then is suspected of having gone further to leak information about his secret deal with the Gillard government the night before his dumping to ensure that he would be given a senior position in the new Labor cabinet if Labor win the upcoming election. ( WA Today, 16 July 2010- "Rudd's political ghost haunts Gillard." [Note: there were only 4 people in the secret meeting. Although Kevin Rudd never admitted that he was the one who leaked the secret deal, nearly everyone in the media is pointing at him].

When in the position of Foreign Minister in the newly elected Gillard’s government, Rudd used tax payer money to jet around 20 countries in just 100 days, apparently trying to get himself a high level United Nation position. This has some Labor MPs wondering: "Just what the hell is Kevin up to?"(The Daily Telegraph, 23 Dec 2010 - "Kevin Rudd's eye on UN hot seat." [Note: this is published under opinion].

While eyeing United Nation jobs, Kevin Rudd again tried to position himself as the next Prime Minister by continuing to disclose secret cabinet meetings to explain to the Australian public that his decision to dump certain policies prior to the election was a result of pressure from members of his own Cabinet. (News Limited, 6 April 2011 - "I'm not shutting up about my time as Prime Minister, says Kevin Rudd."

It has also been reported that, Kevin Rudd has “quietly launched himself on a one-man campaign trail, visiting electorates across the nation,” and “introducing himself to strangers, "Hi mate, Kevin. What's your name ?" (News Limited, 10 April 2011 - "Hi, I'm Kevin Rudd and I'm here to help."

Apparently, over the last few months, as a cabinet minister under the Australian Tax Payer’s payroll, Kevin Rudd has been working for himself, with no or little communication with the Prime Minister.

3) In a hung parliament with few seats short, Gillard’s government cannot survive with any single member of her coalition partners or members of her own party swinging their support against her. Therefore, her government can do nothing about the behaviour of her foreign minister beside creating her own “malicious leaks designed to discredit the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.” (The Australian, 15 Feb 2011 - "Kevin Rudd backlash rattles cabinet."

In order to maintain her grip on power, Prime Minister Gillard reportedly offers Independent MP, Andrew Wilkie “more one-on-one prime ministerial contact than is enjoyed by most ministers and mandarins”. (WA Today, 27 Nov 2010 - "Gillard's grip on power."

The Gillard’s government is busily dealing with the Greens as well on policy direction to stay in power as she broke her own election promise on the issue of Carbon Tax. (See Herald Sun, 25 March 2011 - "Julia Gillard's carbon policy a desperate measure." When the public form a perception that it is the Greens who formulated Labor policy, Julie Gillard again repositioned herself by publicly claiming that her coalition partners, “[the] Greens don't share Australian values” (Adelaide Now, 1 April 2011) and then criticised the Greens as “Extremists” (Herald Sun, 7 April 2011).

Within the last few months since Labor came into power, there is more news of politicking within the party, with coalition partners and with the opposition party than any actual policy initiative being announced.

4) The opposition is not doing any better. For instance, they have embroiled themselves in a number of poll driven racial issues, such as the asylum seekers issue, with a decades old slogan “Stop the boats,” and migrant-bashing such as in "Morrison sees votes in anti-Muslim strategy," (Brisbane Times, 17 Feb 2011). They offer no policy to assist Australians who are struggling with the cost of living. On the contrary, there are a number of policies to chop ofests across the Middle East and most disadvantage people in Australian society. Some examples: "Libs to cut incentives for poorer university students," (The Australian, 19 Aug 2010), "Tony Abbott calls for welfare crackdown", (The Telegraph, 31 march 2011)

5) Meanwhile, in NSW state politics, Liberal leader Barry O’Farrell managed to win a landslide victory without having to produce any detailed policies (Inside, 18 March 2011).

6) And, in Queensland, after years of political infighting with consistently poor poll rating, the LNP has decided to change their leader again. This time, they invited an outsider a person without a seat in the State Parliament - the Lord Mayor of Brisbane City Council, Campbell Newman, to be their leader for the position of Premier in the coming election.

This is in part because, during the recent floods in Brisbane, Campbell Newman, as Mayor of the city, has received exposure on national television every day for weeks and is now a familiar household name. This situation apparently prompted former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to "describe the circumstances of Campbell Newman's foray into state politics as 'weird'" (Courier mail, 23 March 2011).

Mr. Newman, while still officially the Mayor of Brisbane, and as somebody who have just entered state party politics suddenly in circumstances described as “weird” decided to give a fresh start to the LNP by simply binning all existing policies formulated by his predecessors. (Brisbane Times, 29 March 2011 - "All current LNP policies 'null and void': Newman declares new beginning,". Apparently, he has binned those policies without spending any time analysing and understanding wider issues and problems relating to the State of Queensland and the LNP.

The only thing that interests our politicians

As demonstrated from the above 6 examples, the only thing that interest our politicians is to stay in power. Election promises may be brushed aside. Existing policies can be binned overnight by a new leader who has charm but little experience in party leadership and state politics; politicians embroil themselves in race base politics because they believe it is a vote winner; cabinet minister can use tax payer money to run his personal agendas without having to consult the Prime Minister; an independent MP winning a seat with just a tiny margin, holding the balance of power in a minority government, may take up more prime ministerial time than ministers over a single issue “pokie reform”.

Individualism seems to rule the day. Who is going to serve the interest of the people and the nation?

Meanwhile, as a record number of Australians suffer poverty and homelessness, our Members of Parliament busily increase their personal wealth by being the top lodgers of dodgy tax claims on the one hand (News Limited, 17 March 2011 - "Australian MPs top lodgers of dodgy tax claims, ATO investigation reveals"), and boosting their own pay rises by the thousands of dollars just few month ago, on the other. (Adelaide Now, 18 Nov 2010)

Democracy Needs Reform

The world is getting more and more complex in the 21st century. Can any Tom, Dick or Harry on the street understand the complexity of the modern age? Will they have the knowledge, expertise, skills and ethical values to serve the very people that voted them into the Parliament? How long can we afford to have second, third or ninth rated people in the Parliament doing nothing right for us?

At a time of economic uncertainty, rising international conflict, and global inflation with increasing pressure on the cost of living, voters become so irrational that they simply wanted a quick fix on every problem they face. The popularity of governments is on a roller coaster. The life span of a government may become shorter and shorter. As a result, opponent parties are able to win election in landslide without having to put forward any detailed policy.

The charm of politicians has become more important than the substance of their policies. Will such a trend lead to political process where fewer and fewer deep thinkers will be able to make their way into Parliament?

Democracy is great! But should we begin to ask ourselves the following questions:

Is democracy in the current form known to the US, Australia and other English-speaking nations the best for the survival of mankind?
Is there room for improvement?
What is the purpose of democracy if people we have voted in fail to serve the interests of the very people that voted for them?
How long can we afford to have politicians not doing anything right for us?

Will the current form of western democracy eventually result in mass poverty and humanitarian disaster?

In this time of economic uncertainty, in the US, people are also increasingly conscious of the quality of their politicians. The Washington Post recently carried a report, "2012 Republican presidential candidates all have flaws," (30 Jan 2011). A survey by NBC News/Wall Street Journal (March 2010) indicated that the Congress enjoy only 17% of approval rating from the American public.

In the UK, the 2010 election also resulted in a hung parliament, with all three major parties failing “to disclose to the voters the scale of tax rises and public sector cuts required to tackle the financial crisis.” The outcome of this election has been labeled “No Choice Democracy.”

Other systems exist and China's, with which I am familiar, has been very much misunderstood by the Western World due to the disinformation of the mainstream Western Media. (I will try to find time to write an article on democracy with Chinese characteristics some time in the future.)

In the meantime, this article in the Guardian (19 January 2011) under the heading, "China's tentative steps towards democracy," may interest you. The article ended by quoting a statement made by Daniel Bell, a Canadian-born professor of political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who says China may be groping toward "a political model that works better than western-style democracy".

For the sake of humanity and the welfare of the Western Public, should we forgo our cold war mentality against China and begin to look objectively into the positive aspects of the Chinese Communist Party and their progressive political ideology and methodology?

Written on 12 April 2011

Copyright © 2009 - 2011 Outcast Journalist - Chua, Wei Ling

Of all annual rituals, Halloween strikes me as the most absurd. The eternal question is, why do we need to scare children in an era when real-life horror envelopes us?

Publishing trivia and avoiding inconvenient truths

More than a year ago I was invited to become one of the people the Vancouver Province newspaper would turn to when they wanted a short opinion on current issues. "Here is your chance to get your say in The Province!" they explained. Silly me, I expected to be asked to comment on issues of over-riding importance. But I forgot that newspaper owners don't see that their mandate is necessarily to inform and educate the public. Instead it is to both tillilate and sedate them with inconsequential rubbish. The world is burning so let's all fiddle. As long as the advertisers and subscribers are happy, who the (expletive) cares? Even environmental journalists tip-toe around brutal inconvenient truths to satisfy our psychotic need for a happy ending. As T. Michael Maher revealed in his seminal study, "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection", only one in ten environmental stories identified populaton growth as a root cause of the problem, even those reporters who are most aware of its critical importance shied away from it. Newspaper editors and reporters won't go near the ticking time-bomb of human overpopulation---- they are so frightened of tackling this taboo that they choose instead to frighten us with symptoms and sideshows.

Why conjure up imaginary horrors?

The following is a sample of the kind of trivia that excites the editors of the mainstream press. "What do you like to do to celebrate Halloween?" the Vancouver Province asks. What would your response be? Mine would be something like, "As a dress rehearsal for the impending collapse of industrial society I want to spend my Halloween hunkered down in my bunker provisioned with enough food supplies and ammo to deal with the legions of starving marauders who will attempt to get at them. For entertainment I will watch "The Road" which conjures up more terrifying images than the ghosts and gobblins of Halloween night. Instead of indulging in the cliched fantasies of the supernatural, why doesn't the Province attempt to educate its readership about the very real horrors that Peak Oil will visit upon us?"

There can be no 'duck and cover' from $300/barrel oil

The submission date is providentially ironic, October 27th. It was about this time of year when, following my 12th birthday, the Cuban missile crisis was upon us. At school I was taught to "duck and cover", and on my way home, the air raid siren two blocks away went daily off just for practice in case I wasn't traumatized enough. Like other kids, on more than one occassion, I ran home in panic . For almost two weeks, I would come home to find my mother standing over the ironing board in front of our black and white TV set, with her eyes glued to Walter Kronkite while, almost robotically, her hand guided the iron over the newly dried clothes, or sat mending them from a chair positioned to see the unfolding drama. On some afternoons she would just sit there transfixed and paralytic. I can still see her now. Like my classroom, my home was a morgue, and I could read the same fear on the faces of my parents that my teacher, Mrs. Nergaard had. They didn't dare to tell us how serious the situation was, but they didn't have to. School children of all ages knew. They read body language too. After all, we got Reader's Digest and I remember it was full of nuclear war scenarios. I remember reading one story about how a family survived the onslaught of Russian bombers by being prepared. How I begged my Dad to build a bomb shelter. But my parents were wise. They made it clear that there was there was no secure shelter from an atomic blast in our city nor from the fall-out thereafter. Even if we did survive for a time, they pointed out, our supplies would run out, and if they didn't, we could not possibly prevent less prepared survivors from taking them. The same arguments could be made now. We will see a collapse of some kind of horrendous and unprecedented proportions, either abrupt or protracted, and there will be no sanctuary from privation when our economy crashes. And certainly not from the nuclear, chemical or biological war that could ensue from the desperate competition between nations for scarce resources. There can be no duck and cover from $300/barrel oil.

As if real-life horror was not enough to contend with

What struck me then, even at that age, was the absurdity of having been 'scared shitless' for two weeks in October, and then, still shaken, being subjected to an obscene but sanctioned ritual at the end of the month whereby kids were once more 'scared shitless' ---- only with corpses, skeletons, axe-murderers, poltergeists and demons instead of mushroom clouds. All in good fun, you see, and with enough of a sugar overdose from Halloween candies to keep our pancreas pumping for days. As if real life-horror was not enough to contend with.

Forget Stephen King. I will stick with the two Richards, Duncan and Heinberg. That's horror enough for me now.
Have a Happy Halloween.

Tim Murray
October 25/2010

John Faine refused to debate Kevin Bracken, a caller to his Melbourne ABC 'talk back' show on the September 11 terrorist atrocity, after which Faine, in seeming league with Labor and Coalition politicians and the corporate newsmedia, whipped up what almost became a national witch-hunt against Bracken. However, they got more than they bargained for when public opinion swang behind Kevin Bracken. We have transcribed in full, with comments, one of Faine's videoed "defences" of his conduct, so that readers can judge for themselves.

See also comment Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken, Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11

9/11 conspiracy theorists swamping talkback: Faine

And welcome to the Friday wrap-up. It is a bit chaotic today. We've got Di Fingleton, Bill Mc Innes and a cast of thousands.

It's been an extraordinary week , too.

(Inaudible response to Jon Faine.)

I don't want to talk about 9/11 conspiracies theorists and the like. Well, I kind of do, but I don't. I don't want to start it up again.

Editorial comment: After refusing to debate Kevin Bracken and starting what came close to becoming a national witch-hunt against Bracken for his supposedly outrageous questioning of the official account 9/11, Faine tells his listeners that he, himself "kinda do[es]" "want to talk about 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the like." Perhaps he should explain to his listeners why he thinks he should judged any less harshly than he judged Kevin Bracken for raising the taboo topic of questioning 9/11 on his 'talk-back' show.

We are clearly being targeted now after what happened on Wednesday afternoon when Kevin Bracken from the Maritime Union and the President of the Trades Hall chose to call in_{#main-22oct-fn1">1}. We didn't call him. He called us. ...

Editorial comment: It's a talk-back show, I would have thought. What is Jon Faine trying to say? That he thinks that a member of the public, such as Kevin Bracken, with a view about the principle justification for this country's, so far, nine year intervention in Afghanistan, is not entitled to ring up a talk-back show in order to put that view?

... He said you can't have a parliamentary debate about Afghanistan unless you are prepared to talk about what really happened and the truth of what happened at the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September and off it went. ...

Editorial comment: So Jon Faine believes that the principle justification for the war in Afghanistan should not be discussed by the very same body which voted to send our soldiers to fight in that war?

...And now it's Friday and I have probably countless e-mails, text messages and phone calls. We are clearly being targetted now, by all the people who think there is more to it than we've ever been told and "the media" (with a gesture with both hands indicating quote marks) are part of the conspiracy. And having just got a little crack in the door open, we're getting phone calls from all around Australia. We're getting e-mails from around the world. People are saying "Uhh! Here is a point where we can have our claims fully explored. It's been a very intense week because of that. Ahh! On the other hand, I stuck my neck out. I've called them loonies. I've had a go.

I think this is corrosive of peoples' trust in the rule of law and democracy. I still believe that. I don't resile for a moment from anything I've said. , but in the background you can see that --- There's John Standish, one fo my producers -- dealing with all the complaints of people saying that we're arrogant, we're high-handed and we're dismissive and that's not our role here at the ABC and that will take weeks for us to deal with. Such is life!

Footnotes

#main-22oct-fn1" id="main-22oct-fn1">1. #main-22oct-fn1-txt">[back] See also PM story "Vic union leader says September 11 attacks a conspiracy" for some of the dialogue and my comment. As with the dialogue show above the actual words of a person, baiting someone for having expressed an honestly held opinion about an important issues do that person making those remarks no credit.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3043700.htm

See also comment Jon Faine baits, refuses to debate, Kevin Bracken, Gillard, Faine, disdainful of reasonable doubt on 9/11

Anti-growth activists are caught in a vice. In large urban areas bursting at the seams with overtaxed infrastructure, the potent force of the growth lobby and the pervasive influence of the media that supports it makes opposition to the growth juggernaut hazardous to mind, body and spirit. Yet life in a rural locality presents an even more daunting challenge. The costs of growth are not so manifest to those who do not understand its exponential nature. The benefits of fresh air, tranquility and wildlife are taken for granted, and the allure of big city amenities is irresistible. Locals are beguiled by the promise that new development will solve unemployment, increase the supply of affordable housing and keep young people close to hearth and home. To stand up against growth in a small town is to invite ostracism and ridicule from uncomprehending minds that cannot understand why anyone would oppose "progress". The following letter was submitted to the newspaper of one such town, but it could have been the template for letters to almost any small town newspaper in North America or Australia or elsewhere---newspapers which live on the advertising revenue from the businesses that profit from growth.

Civic boosterism predictable and mistaken

From rural Nova Scotia to rural BC, the clichés of civic boosterism are as predictable as they are wrong. Sables-Spanish Rivers appears to be no different. Forum participants in the upcoming township elections seem to be reading from the same script that growth-addicts in my own community are.

“We need to bring in business to bring down taxes.” “Economic development is a priority...its not just about bringing new business...it’s about smart growth, maintaining the tax base.” “ New development will create needed jobs”. “We need to attract new families”. “We need to bring our kids back”. “There is nothing here for the kids”. “Once a school is gone a community begins to collapse”.

Reality

It is the same tired record heard across the land for time immemorial. But what are the facts?

Bigger towns, bigger taxes and lower average incomes

As a rule, the larger the town or city, the higher the taxes. Why? Because the tax revenues that are generated by growth do not offset the infrastructure costs of extended services that must be provided—water, sewage, road maintenance, police and fire protection, waste disposal and so forth. Creating new jobs may indeed attract newcomers, but is so doing it does not lower the unemployment rate. More people require more jobs. Moreover, business growth is correlated with lower per capita incomes, and lower paying jobs-- not limited housing stock or serviceable land--- makes housing unaffordable. And undeveloped property pays more property taxes than it costs in services---not many cows or trees demand medical or educational services.

Self-importance blinds local boosters both to real values and real limits

Some people seem to equate quality of life with more amenities, and having left the urban rat race wish to reproduce it in the bucolic paradise that attracted them, while accusing those who oppose them of being selfish. But the real question is not whether continued growth is necessary or desirable, but whether it is possible. It is astounding that civic debates are conducted without the slightest comprehension or awareness of Peak Oil and its implications. With triple-digit oil and ten dollar a litre gasoline on the near horizon, we will have more to worry about than keeping ice rinks and schools open. Feeding the mouths that are already here may prove to be an insuperable challenge. Forget fuelling the local Zamboni, fuelling tractors will be our focus. Growth ,“smart” or dumb, will not be an option.

Tim Murray

Quathiaski Cove, BC
October 14/2019

Try writing to the daily newspaper, or commenting on a Murdoch News Limited newspaper blog or to a Fairfax newspaper blog, or even on an ABC Radio programme blog.

There, feel better? So what have you gained? Well you have perhaps vented spleen, so gained personal gratification. But another day another paper and reader memories are short. Soon the blog comment section will be 'closed' and inaccessible. So what then have you really gained? Has anyone read it? Will what you've written have any impact, even if people did read it? Will your comments contribute in anyway to an issue?

Don't delude yourself! Writing to corporate (mass) media only benefits the media moguls in stymieing dissent. Blog comments in the mass media go nowhere and achieve nothing. The comments quickly get 'closed' and inaccessible. Dissent is thus lured, netted and buried.

The mass media have only recently promoted their blogs in order to distract vocal readers from contributing to free (alternative) media, like the not-for profit CanDoBetter, Tasmanian Times, etc.

This is one reason why I do not contribute any information to corporate media.
Let the moguls wallow in self-serving propaganda, let them continue be more irrelevant to ordinary people, to lose readership and advertising revenue. Their only in it for the money and the influence anyway. Many of the tabloids have become comic books.

Think I'm being unfair on corporate media? Well, an exposé article in the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald 9th October 2010 by former News Limited editor Bruce Guthrie was entitled 'Falling out with Rupert' (Murdoch). The opening two paragraphs read:

"Within the News empire, talent is one thing but absolute discretion to Rupert Murdoch's world view and various causes is another. And it's far more important than talent.

The most highly regarded people at News are little more than Murdoch robots, programmed to consider him first and the issue second..."

Guthrie further observes:

"Newspaper editors are never far from power or, at least, the people who wield it. This can be quite seductive if you forget one simple fact: it's not you they're really interested in, it;s the machinery you sit atop. Lose the job tomorrow and most politicians will want to cosy up to your successor, regardless of teh circumstances or their qualities."

These extracts are from Bruce Guthrie's new book 'Man bites Murdoch', which I yet to read.

(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])

Original title was: "Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch team up again to can Australians". See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09.

Into the Salty abyss

According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,

Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."

You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.

Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.

Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.

Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:

"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."

(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)

James Sinnamon commented on the facts:

In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.

The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:

By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.

Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:

During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.

Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:

"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)

Sinnamon asks,

Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?

In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.

(See also "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665)

Commercialising treachery

Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.

And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.

So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?

What The Australian wouldn't print

As Greg Wood writes:

Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?

Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.

And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!

Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au

But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:

Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?

However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.

At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:

ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today

Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??

Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today

Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it

I like this one - short and to the point:

Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today

What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.

neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today

The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.

Rhetorical Question to the Elites who make money out of the rest of us through war and housing games

Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?

NOTES

[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia

See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09, "Madang landowners fight ecologically devastating Chinese mining invasion" of 1 Apr 10.

Article by Mark O'Connor

Despite The Age's headline, "Populate or Stagnate," (March 10, 2010) most of Saul Eslake's[1] article is about admitting the costs of population growth. He makes some very useful admissions (see the phrases I have marked in bold, below).

Even at the end when he swings round predictably to backing growth, he warns his allies:

"But building public acceptance for ''a bigger Australia'' requires a greater willingness to acknowledge that it has costs, as well as benefits. It also needs more readiness to deal with those problems than has thus far been shown by those most enthusiastic about the benefits of faster population growth."

This is a tactic the growth lobby and our politicians are already following. At the Queensland Property Council's conference last Friday both Anna Bligh and Tania Plibersek repeatedly stated that they understood people's pain, and that they admitted and deeply understood the problems population growth was causing. Yet in the end their solution was to press on regardless and tell people to get used to it. Hence they talked vaguely about how "better planning" or "us in government trying harder" or "letting people see a few iconic examples of good high rise development as soon as possible" would solve the problem. I call this their "Yes, repeat No" approach.

"Yes, we hear your pain and we understand absolutely. No we don't intend to take any notice of your protests."

While this tactic is infuriating, it is also a sign that they know they are in a weak position. It will rapidly become untenable if we articulate (as I have above) what their ploy is, and demand that they stop doing it (or even that they apologise for having tried to hoodwink us with it).

In Saul's case, he hangs almost everything on his argument that if government was prepared to borrow more boldly to provide extra infrastructure in advance of the population needing it rather than, as at present, "in a discontinuous or ''lumpy' manner" ---then the problems of population growth would be solved.

Infrastructure for growth costs vastly exceed benefits of growth

He fails to understand the points made in Jane O'Sullivan's recent article "The downward spiral of hasty population growth"

As she points out, the reason governments can't catch up with infrastructure is that the costs of infrastructure for additional people so vastly exceed the extra benefits that extra people bring. The infrastructure costs can in some respects outweigh the economic gains by as much as 30 to 1.

"Does it make sense," asks Jane O'Sullivan, "that we’re incurring a 25 per cent of GDP cost to avoid less than 0.8 per cent of GDP cost?"

Saul's (and the Grattan Institute's) biases also show when he lists the "dampening" of wages in favor of business profits as a self-evident good.

Mr Eslake seems to have placed the same article in several papers and online forums. Google "saul Eslake" + "Populate or stagnate" for the list.

NOTES

[1]Saul Eslake was for 14 years chief economist at the ANZ Bank. In August 2009 he moved to the Melbourne-University-affiliated Grattan Institute as Program Director for its Productivity Growth Program. The Grattan Institute is part of the growth lobby, or in the more genteel language of the University’s media release “The Grattan Institute is a new think tank aiming to shape the direction of debate on many of the important challenges facing Australia. It was set up with substantial support from the University of Melbourne in conjunction with the Commonwealth and Victorian Governments, and BHP Billiton. Note by Mark O’Connor )

One of the biggest dilemmas for environmental realists is striking the right balance between the potential infringement of human rights required to power down to a more sustainable society on one hand, and the inevitable threat to human rights if we don't take action now. Let's call this the human rights dilemma. One solution is simply to deny the relevance of the coming environmental collapse by idealising a variant form of cornucopia, believing everything would be okay if we just wrested power from the corporate-military elite and brought about a new world order founded on the principles of liberty, fraternity and egalitarianism, extending the ideals of the French revolution to all 6.5 billion citizens alive today and making room for the 9 billion plus expected to grace our humble planet by 2050. Wouldn't it be wonderful if billions more could enjoy the North American way of life with sprawling verdant suburbs, neat bungalows with double garages and private swimming pools populated by shiny happy citizens. Sadly such a reality is just a fantasy promoted by soap operas, incessant but often subtle advertising and peer pressure, but it's the ideal to which billions of our fellow world citizens aspire. The endless, but usually fruitless, pursuit of consumertopia is, as amply documented in Oliver James' excellent book Affluenza, the cause of much distress. Many teenagers in affluent countries acquire a deep sense of inferiority because they lack the kind of consumer gadgets as their peers have or because they fail to emulate the cooldom and aesthetic perfection of media role models. Worse still the exponential rise in aggregate consumption by our species is ultimately suicidal, not just for indviduals but the vast majority of our fellow human beings. When nature begins to take its course, with its periodic natural distasters affecting ever greater numbers of people, you can bet the poorest and most vulnerable will always be the first to go.

The trendy left has long believed we can metaphorically have our cake and eat it. We can somehow let newcomers to our land join our consumer frenzy and cut carbon emissions. We can miraculously guarantee everyone affordable transport, cheap food, free healthcare and an extensive welfare state and reduce collective consumption. We can incredibly subsidise single parents and unwanted babies and simultaneously guarantee every child love, good education and a bright future. Such idealists live, pardon my French, in cloud cuckoo land. We can obviously only welcome newcomers to our land if our environment and economy can sustain their presence. Likewise we can only provide transport, food, healthcare and social benefits if we can sustainably maintain the material means required. We can only subsidise unwanted children by spending billions on social workers, childcare professionals and state benefits, diverting resources from other needy categories, e.g. a child in council care can cost a UK council as much as £90,000 a year and in all likelihood will continue to be a burden on public finances later in life. A prevailing culture of hedonism and entitlements has created a situation in the UK where over 2 million adults live on incapacity benefit not because they suffer from a severe sensory or physical impairment, but because of essentially psychological problems brought on by social marginalisation and self-destroying indulgence in drugs and booze, whether legal or illegal.

As a result the country has recently attracted over a million newcomers from Eastern Europe to do jobs in the catering, building, transport and agricultural sectors that home-grown Britons used to do. The Polish plumber phenomenon has affected not just the bustling overcrowded metropolis of London, but has spread far and wide to areas with high indigenous unemployment. Some businesses like Subway and Starbucks have actively recruited new migrants and then sent them to their outlets the length and breadth of the land. In just 4 years we have learned to expect to be served by recent economic migrants and hardly blink an eyelid when outside we see another home-bred homeless islander selling the Big Issue or another alcoholic beggar pestering us for loose change. So why does the Big Issue seller not take up plumbing and why does the beggar not get a job in Starbucks, Caffè Nero or Costa Coffee? The sad truth is that too much hard work is required to learn the tricks of the trade required by competent plumbers and most native Brits on benefits would not be much better off on the minimum wage. Worse still most customers would rather be served by polite, attractive and smiling Eastern European staff in their early twenties than emotionally insecure and often incompetent members of Britain's underclass of non-productive long-term benefit claimants. The corporate-state behemoth has effectively dumbed down the former working class, while importing a steady flow of smarter and keener migrant workers from countries where young people are still motivated to learn the hard skills any viable society needs. To cap it all, I've even witnessed migrant care workers looking after mentally ill indigenous citizens. Such is the shortage of competent maths teachers willing to endure the stress of British secondary schools that increasingly education authorities resort to importing human resources from countries where an interest in the abstract science of numbers is still cool. Meanwhile indigenous teachers are deserting the profession in their droves, intimidated not only by children unruly behaviour but by a culture of fear, litigation, lack of respect and celebrity worship. The government talks tough on combatting the perceived threats of terrorism, street crime and illegal immigration, softening public opposition to draconian surveillance state legislation, but has actually created a hypercompetitive labour market with a large reservoir of disgruntled and alienated workers, desperately seeking a piece of the action. The net result is a brain drain in countries of net emigration and growing dependence on the tentacles of corporate grandeur and an enslaving welfare state. Yet for every newcomer to the wealthy world boosting their per capita consumption, there remain billions in the poor world unable to scrape together the funds for a one-way ticket to the citadels of consumerdom, but increasingly reliant on trickle-down subsidies sent home by distant relatives.

#OpiumOfThePeople" id="OpiumOfThePeople">Opium of the People

It's hard to get closer to the heart of the corporate elite manipulating and conditioning the governing classes of the world's highest consumption economies than Rupert Murdoch. His media empire has in large part been responsible for winning popular support for neo-liberal or neo-conservative governments in the UK, Australia, the US and elsewhere. In the UK the switch from Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party to Tony's Blair's New Labour Party represented no shift in Rupert Murdoch's long term agenda. Both were tools that facilitated the implementation of globalist policies and transferred power away from local centres of power to unaccountable transnational corps and spurious supranational entities. Yet Murdoch has always known how to tailor his incessent propaganda to the target audience. In London, UK, you can pick up the Sun often bundled with free chocolate bars, bingo tickets or fuel discount vouchers, then enter Starbucks only to pick up a copy of the Times with your coffee. On the way home, you have to dodge distributors of the freebie LondonPaper, also owned by News International, and replete with celebrity gossip and other news deemed to be of a greater interest to trendy twenty-somethings who work in the city's thriving new media and advertising companies. This joins other freebies like the Metro, City A.M. and London Lite all aggressively handed out gratis by low-paid and usually migrant workers. Such papers end up littering the rapid transport system. The London Times still sets a semi-serious tone, requiring a reading age over ten, and a keen interest in world affairs. Its regular columnists include former Marxists and unlimited growth enthusiasts, Brendan O'Neill and Mick Hume, forever attacking green fascists as naive apologists for eugenics and simply writing their perceived enemies off as against progress. To this print media empire, we should of course, add Sky TV and Fox News.

It comes as little surprise alongside semi-intellectual apologists for our high-consumption lifestyle, the Murdoch press hires the services of populist automobile evangelist and TV celebrity of Top Gear fame, Jeremy Clarkson, responsbile for driving a landrover up a Scottish mountain, another 4x4 all the way to the North Pole and hiring a personal double-decker bus to take advantage of apparently empty bus-only lanes, which he thinks should be available to cars. At the Borders book store Top Gear now boasts its own section, replete with glossy picture books of shiny motors for aspriring Formula 1 champs to drool over.

It takes quite a huge leap of the imagination to conclude that the liberal media is largely responsible for environmental scare stories, but alas a growing number of left-leaning pundits such as William Engdahl and Greg Palast have gone down this route. A cult has arisen around climate change denial movies. Anthropogenic climate change is, of course, only a small piece in a much larger puzzle and, I dare say, often serves to dodge the key issue of the long-term sustainability of our growth-addicted model of development. We need merely raise the spectre of pseudo-environmentalist aristocrats such as Al Gore, Ted Turner or Prince Philip to whip up a mass frenzy of indignation against a secret plot to forcibly reduce the world's population and thus deny billions of the world's poor of the same luxuries we take for granted in the prosperous world.

It's hard to deny that environmental concerns tend to appeal much more to the better-educated professional classes than the wider working and welfare-dependent classes, including most recent economic migrants. Billions are invested annually in the never-ending promotion of consumption, entertainment and pure unadulterated mind control. The other day I asked a lady why she was reaching so eagerly for her copy of the Sun. Apparently unaware of who owned and controlled the newspaper, her reason for buying it was simple, to find out what's on the telly and read more celebrity gossip. No doubt she wrote me off as pompous twat with no affinity for the working class. Out in the provinces away from cosmopolitan metropolises, the UK has become a maize of Tesco Towns, with the masses meeting only for their weekly shopping sprees or to engage in entertainment events organised by large corporate operations. When not at work or at school, most are glued to gigantic plasma screens watching action-packed movies, surfing the commercialised Internet, engaging in violence-themed videogames or seeking new partners in dumbed-down chatrooms.

#GreenTokenism" id="GreenTokenism">Green Tokenism

The real debates on the future of our species and sustainability of our civilisation we should be holding have been significantly dumbed down on two fronts. First, the masses from Aberdeen to Zagreb or Sydney to Shanghai are lured by the never-ending promotion of the North American way of life, quite obviously unattainable for most. In this context eco-friendliness is just another desirable commodity. Second, the chattering classes are presented with simplified moral arguments about our duty to tackle a whole host of evils, ranging from climatic catastrophes, racism, despotic regimes, famine, energy security, homophobia, women's rights, child abuse, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. Whatever the purported problem, the solutions on offer assume the moral and cultural superiority of the enlightened global elite. Take the UK's Independent Newspaper, renowned for its championing of environmental causes. It's also one of the most unashamed proponents of immigration to an already overcrowded island. Yet for the simple minds of many sandal-wearing leftists, there is no conflict. Welcoming newcomers to our shores and buying energy-saving lightbulbs or cycling to work to reduce our environmental footprint are both part of our duty to help build a better world. Sadly in the grand scheme of things such efforts are futile. I can cycle to work or choose to tolerate overcrowded trains to reduce my carbon footprint, but the brainwashed masses, especially those who have just moved to a high consumption region, want to indulge as long they can afford it.

Some former Marxists and a handful of those who still adhere to this religion are acutely aware of the environmental paradox. Mike Davis, a Los Angeles-based activist, formerly associated with the International Socialists and author of Planet of Slums. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster and City of Quart, has finally realised that decades of unsustainable development and reliance on a globalised network of multinationals and governmental organisations, has all but destroyed the last vestiges of worker solidarity. In a recent article published in www.informationclearinghouse.info, he concludes:

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards. (full article)

Nonetheless to alleviate the human consequences of catastrophes caused by climate change in the poor world, Mike Davis still asks us to welcome more immigrants aboard our lifeboat. It's like inviting passengers from the lower decks of the Titanic, about to drown in a purportedly unsinkable ship, to board a luxury yacht just a few hundred metres away. Some would brave the icy waters, but while the yacht may accommodate a handful of desperate Titanic passengers, it too would sink if they all reached temporary safety. One way or another our failure to act now by powering down both consumption and reproduction will see an escalation of internecine warfare and famine, while the new corporate aristocracy run for the hills, building themselves havens of tranquillity with the resources they plundered in times of plenty.

This article was originally published with the title "Breeding Hatred"

See also: Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration by Sir Andrew Green in the Daily Mail of 31 Mar 08, The Collusion of the Left in the Neo-Liberal Agenda of Sep 06, Open Britain by 'open border' extremist Phillipe Legrain and introduction and comments on his own web site. A local copy of a posted comment is to be found here.

Neil's site: (www.outsider-insight.org.uk)