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Donald Trump’s attitude to history the same as Epstein cover-up. Downplaying the racist crimes against humanity in American history by banning reference to them in Smithsonian museum exhibits and elsewhere reeks of covering-up the truth. Funny how similar that is when considering Trump’s cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The paedophile President, who was best friends with America’s most infamous sex trafficker of underage girls, is at it again with the whitewashing of inconvenient truths. Nothing to see here folks! This is despite thousands of victims and hidden cameras in every room at the Epstein mansions. Americans are not the sharpest tools in the shed, obviously.
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AI is coming for your job. As someone who has just been replaced by an automated program this is real, let me tell you. In light of this it is pertinent to remember that Australia punishes the unemployed economically. It is bipartisan policy of Australian governments to provide below the poverty line welfare payments to the unemployed. This has been going on for decades and is one of the reasons why we have a substantial number of older Australians living in poverty. These folk cannot afford to visit the dentist to get treatment because it is too expensive and dental is not included in Medicare. This in one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
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Australia has a tax problem and I am going to suggest something to remedy that. The ATO is in a hole for some $52 billion, mostly from Australians who owe back taxes. In the most recent financial year that we have records for, some 91 Aussies who earned more than a million dollars paid no tax on that income at all. They managed to do this via creative tax accounting paying professionals hundreds of thousands to make it happen. These folk would rather do this than pay their fair share of tax on their earnings. There is an American flavour to this – the idea that the rich shouldn’t have to pay a lot of tax is promulgated by the wealthy and the GOP in the US. America has a national debt of $37 trillion and this correlates with the reduction of taxes on the wealthy over the last few decades. The top income tax rate was in the 90% range in the 1960s and that has come down to 37% as of now – that is a huge drop. Company taxes have come down substantially, as well, in recent times. Wealthy individuals and corporations are not paying their fair share of tax.
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Day 3 of having no power due to a storm. No service: Profitability is the new power. Yes, this post is written under the duress of being cut off from electricity in my home and work. We live in a time, where being connected to the grid is more essential than ever before. Everything now runs on electricity. My gripe is that despite this clear and present reality, we are still dependent upon outdated and fragile infrastructure. 50 years ago, as I was growing up, I heard about the plans to put the power lines underground. Indeed, this has been achieved in many new suburbs. I do wonder why in this wonderful new world of privatised utilities how so many more established suburbs and towns have not been transformed in this subterranean fashion. Storms wreak havoc to power lines on poles.
Do you find reading stuff to be a bit of a drag? Are you always on the look out for an easy hack? The bad news is that if you don’t exercise your brain function you will pay for it later on. Use it or lose it! Technology may seem great and so convenient, but it is dumbing us down and charging us for the service at the same time. Reading utilises different parts of the brain than watching videos. Processing the meaning of words and sentences makes you smarter and not the machine. Ruminating on important stuff via reading essays will make you wiser. Here are 5 good reasons why reading will save your brain.
We do not have a progressive national news platform in Australia. We have a rabid right wing News Corp, which controls most of the nation’s newspapers, has a national radio network and produces Sky News Australia and Fox News. Nine Fairfax and Seven West Media can be comfortably described as corporate legacy media on the right of centre, politically speaking. The ABC, our only truly national broadcaster, follows the News Corp lead in what it sets as the daily news agenda. This was not always the case, as a couple of decades ago the ABC contained the most intelligent and passionate journalists working around the nation. How the ABC lost its progressive soul? Is a question well worth asking.
And yes, we are all pretty stupid at times. However, the current predilection in America for MAGA types to blame people who work for the government for all their ills is a serious travesty. Ignorant folk lashing out at things they don’t truly understand and despicable political operatives encouraging it for electoral success is where we find ourselves. Stupid people like to blame anyone but themselves for their misfortune in life. Viewing civil servants as a group who lead cushy lives is so far off the mark as to be ridiculous but stupid is as stupid does in the USA.
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Here is an interesting fact. Support for One Nation is highest in areas where there are relatively few migrants living. Regional areas and outer suburban electorates, where the vast majority of populations are white bread. Why then do they go on about the issue of high levels of immigration in Australia? It is not actual lived experience. Could it be because they watch Sky News Australia and listen to reactionary shock jocks on the radio? Blaming immigrants, refugees and foreigners, more generally, is a right wing populist saw. Combine this with a general underlying racism inherited down through generations and you probably get what is really going on here. Pauline Hanson has been banging on about her white supremacist views for decades and now has Gina Rinehart to bankroll her hate speech infected perspective downunder.
Culture Economics Fresh Government Politics Power Here is an interesting fact. Support for One Nation is highest in areas where there are relatively few migrants living. Regional areas and outer suburban electorates, where the vast majority of populations are white bread. Why then do they go on about the issue of high levels of immigration in Australia? It is not actual lived experience. Could it be because they watch Sky News Australia and listen to reactionary shock jocks on the radio? Blaming immigrants, refugees and foreigners, more generally, is a right wing populist saw. Combine this with a general underlying racism inherited down through generations and you probably get what is really going on here. Pauline Hanson has been banging on about her white supremacist views for decades and now has Gina Rinehart to bankroll her hate speech infected perspective downunder.
Culture Economics Fresh Government Politics Power
Here is an interesting fact. Support for One Nation is highest in areas where there are relatively few migrants living. Regional areas and outer suburban electorates, where the vast majority of populations are white bread. Why then do they go on about the issue of high levels of immigration in Australia? It is not actual lived experience. Could it be because they watch Sky News Australia and listen to reactionary shock jocks on the radio? Blaming immigrants, refugees and foreigners, more generally, is a right wing populist saw. Combine this with a general underlying racism inherited down through generations and you probably get what is really going on here. Pauline Hanson has been banging on about her white supremacist views for decades and now has Gina Rinehart to bankroll her hate speech infected perspective downunder.
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PM Anthony Albanese was never going to stand up to the gas industry downunder. Weak leaders follow the power elite. They are content to see inequity and inequality flourish in this time of zombie neoliberalism. Nero fiddled whilst Rome burned or so the story goes. Governments do little these days but talk and let the markets run the show to the detriment of the working poor. We have a severe housing crisis and it is not getting any better. What is the government doing about it? Talking about it, but talk is cheap. They are not actually getting their hands dirty and getting into the game by building houses themselves. No, they are ineffectually encouraging private interests to do something about the housing crisis. The figures do not stack up in terms of meeting the challenge of new housing stock being built at the required rate.
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I thought that it could be useful, in light of the apparent rise in the populist politics of grievance, to ask, so, what does it mean to be Australian? Anti-immigration is the flag waving vanguard theme of One Nation and the remnants of the Liberal party. Blame it on the immigrant appears number one on the political grievance charts downunder. Therefore, it provokes the question – what does it mean to be Australian? If it is not out-and-out racism, as those on the Right deny it to be, who, then, qualifies to be considered an acceptable Australian?
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We have seen a spate of one-size-fits-all welfare payments and subsidies. You know, instead of governments helping the most needy they make stuff free for all. This is done for political purposes in attracting votes at elections. All this does is increase wealth inequality. Well off property owners should not be receiving government assistance in maintaining their lifestyles. This brings us to the Alan Kohler call for free childcare downunder. While I support the general idea, I question why wealthy Australians should qualify for these types of assistance. How about a carve out for those over a certain income and capital asset threshold? We need to reverse the widening wealth divide after decades of American style neoliberalism funnelling riches to a select few in Australia.
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Robodebt was an ideological attack on the welfare system by the Coalition for economic and political gain. When they were unable to find the billions of dollars of claimed to have been rorted, they confabulated them via illegal means. Scott Morrison bragged about being a Robodebt welfare cop in his public announcements as social services minister. If he is not ultimately responsible for a scheme that has cost the lives of the innocent and vulnerable Australians who is. If Scott Morrison is not responsible for the $1.8 billion lost in a settled class action against the government who is.
The Coalition in opposition has voted against legislation designed to halt the massive increases to energy costs for Australian households due to the gas company cartel and its control of that market. The Coalition has, also, voted against the creation of a future fund designed […]
The leaders of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) are calling for unemployment to rise. Yes, the RBA want more Aussies out of work so they can slay the dragon they call inflation. You may not have been aware that for the last 50 years the economists at the RBA have adjudged full employment as an unemployment rate of 4.5%. That equates to around 500, 000 ordinary Australians being out of work. These are the sacrificial bodies and souls, apparently, necessary for the economy to work without high inflation. I have an alternative suggestion. Australians: Is it time to eat the rich?
Watching the 4 Corners expose on the Soviet mole in ASIO I was struck by how unimpressive the people featured in this were. The Australian intelligence service betrayal by this senior espionage supervisor in the 1970s and 1980s was done for cash. These tawdry people playing cloak and dagger in the shadows reflected badly on this state funded service. These operations grew out of the Second World War and brought that mindset to peacetime. Selling secrets to the Soviets for large amounts of cash and getting away with it for decades tells us just how ineffective these services are.
We have had 40 years of people in power telling us that the market will take care of everything. That market forces are the most efficient means of regulating all aspects of our lives. This economic mantra has been repeated by those on both sides of the political divide. Admittedly with more fervour by those on the right with a conservative bent. Well, Australians cannot afford housing, with both renters and first home buyers struggling to put a roof over their heads. The market has not looked after the most basic needs of the many in this regard. Governments have failed Australians and seem powerless and hardly inclined to do anything about this state of affairs. The market has failed renters in Australia and is eating up the livelihoods of a third of Australians.
In Australia, we like to tell people that we are not a racist nation. We are the whizz bang wonders of a multicultural society, after all. We judge things like racism by our own experience of such things. Coming from privileged, white backgrounds, our view of the world is rosy and she’ll be apples mate! Too much is made of this kind of thing. Hell, it doesn’t bother me! Nobody talks much about the concept of walking in another man or woman’s shoes. If you haven’t had shopkeepers and bystanders staring at you suspiciously. If you haven’t had women crossing the street to avoid your presence. If you haven’t experienced closed minds judging you when you apply for a job, a loan, or an even break – how the f*** would you know anything about racism in Australia, really.
In Queensland, yet another Indigenous Australian man is shot dead by police. 6 police officers could not restrain an angry young man with a knife without shooting him dead. The training around guns is so bad that we should follow the British example and only have specialist units armed with deadly force. Australian police: Take their guns away to save lives. Police should not be called out to domestic violence situations, as they too often make things much worse. Police officers in states around Australia fail to talk offenders down and disarm them. Their presence actually escalates the problems and results in the unnecessary use of deadly force.
Melbourne, the Nazi capital of Australia, is, also, the booing capital of the AFL. I wonder if the same folk booing at the footy are the same racist scum booing Aboriginal footballers? Victorian footy fans seem to think it is their God given right to boo every moment of a match when things don’t go their way on the field. It is an ugly sound just listening to it on the TV. Umpires and opposition players and fans have to listen to this crap from ungrateful entitled members of the crowd. Either these folks don’t know the rules of the game or just don’t care and loudly complain anyway. The ugly sound of booing during AFL matches is something you don’t hear at other football codes.
This is the world we now live in, where it is considered to be police policy to taser an old lady with dementia. NSW police so tough they taser 95 year old woman in nursing home. You have to ask yourself if there was, perhaps, another way of disarming an old lady with a steak knife? How about throwing a blanket over her arm and taking the knife off her? How about talking her down without the use of physicality in the first place? Why were the police called at all? Isn’t it the responsibility of staff at the nursing home to manage such incidents?
The Swans never stop trying but list management has let the side down. Yes, injuries have cruelled their chances this season so far but a lack of big man talent is pretty bloody obvious. Lance Franklin is seriously out of form and one needs to ask whether this year is one year too long? Has it been a case of Sydney Swans: Marketing over matter? Too many ‘feel good’ stories and not enough hard-nosed substance has been exposed. Paddy McCartin down back has been a vulnerability waiting to happen like a boxer with a glass jaw.
