politics

Well not really praise as such but, bear with me, while I justify wandering into this absurdity. I know it's difficult to say nice things about MP Craig Kelly, who claimed that people would die because renewables were raising electricity prices. He was perhaps unaware that the World Health Organisation in 2008 calculated that coal particulate pollution caused one million deaths across the world. And Tony Abbott who, between mouthfuls of onion, told us that coal was good for humanity - which was in opposition to both the Pope and the British Royal family's position - the two institutes he holds dear to his heart. Those are just two of 34 confirmed deniers in the LNP, although the Institute of Public Affairs claims half of the LNP members are supporters of their position.

The left has been hijacked by unwitting servants of the neo-liberal agenda.

I was talking to a friend the other day explaining how I always considered myself left wing, but now apparently I wasn’t. I explained why and she declared that the left has been hijacked.

And it struck me: she is right, it totally has. Remember when the left was about worker’s rights? It was about preventing the rich giving themselves privileges whilst denying ordinary people both rights and access to resources. It was, in large part, about protecting people and the environment from the rapacious appetites of the elite rich. In short, the left was about ensuring that everyone had a level of human dignity and the ability to raise a healthy, happy and educated family.

Hi Everyone,

This is a call to arms. The science and other evidence is now without doubt - we are in the final days of our civilisation, whatever it might be called by history; it is hardly Western Civilisation anymore, since the destruction of nature (and I would argue human values, and quite possibly humans) has extended now across the globe.

We have environmentalists who, mostly in small groups, have been fighting the enslaught against nature since industrialism began. They have had their successes, but the rate of destruction is too fast and vicious, and their efforts are overwhelmed.

There is one example that has recently prompted me to post this call. At Stanley one company (with more soon to join) are buying farmland and mining the water i.e extracting the water which is supposed to be for farming and selling it as though it is their own private property. This is not like mining gold, extracting water in this way extracts it from all the neighbours as well. And now more companies/selfish individuals look likely to join the extraction, adding to the problem.

Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull like many other politicians seem to think of themselves as ideas men. Do we really need politicians with 'ideas' or are they a liability?

There are many suspicious features about Craig Thomson’s Health Services Union imbroglio, but notable among them are the apparently close links between HSU “whistleblower” Kathy Jackson and Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. Peter Wicks uncovers a very tangled web

In our one-party growthist state, left and right factions wage a phoney battle of whether to grow the energy pie to satisfy growing demand or to slow down that growth with more conservation measues. But conservation only postpones the day of reckoning. It is time that we stopped growth at its roots.

Click on picture to view video This is a good film about how government and capitalism deprives people of freedom and gets them to coerce each other. It attributes increases in wealth since the second world war to increases in financial freedom, apparently not understanding the importance of the vast store of fossil fuels we have exploited since the 18th century. Nonetheless it makes good and valid points on a classic them.

"Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon -- the most powerful broadband providers -- are trying to fundamentally change the way the Internet works. They're seeking to make even bigger profits by acting as gatekeepers over what we see and do online. If they succeed, the Internet would be more like radio and television: a few major corporations would control which voices are heard most easily, and it would be much harder for grassroots groups, individuals, and small businesses to compete with large corporations and well-funded special interests."

Many population- environment organizations concerned about human population impact on the planet believe they cannot talk about ‘coercive’ population policies, only education and good access to family planning. But are they falling into the same trap as environmental organizations that refuse to acknowledge the overriding evidence that our ever growing numbers are a key part of the problems we face?

Tired, angry, frightened by your government and big business? Surrounded by hysterical idiots? ABC and the shockjocks make you grind your teeth? Don't know where to turn? Need to get a grip? - Look for the Joe Toscano anarchist pod-casts on 3CR Victoria. You can download his soothing but relevant political counsel every week. It's all about relocalise, energy, population, democracy and land-tenure. It's called anarchism, and Joe is the only person I've ever heard talk about it coherently and simply.

The French are standing up to the globalising and financial despots who have shaped industrial relations now since 1973.

During the same month, on 25 February, Dennis Jensen kneecapped his leader by issuing a press release denying that humans are causing climate change, and pointed to Adolf Hitler as an example of how scientists can be wrong. “So, where is this leading to?” readers may ask. Well it’s all to do with the pestilence of propaganda.

Political analyst, Dr Ted Trainer, takes political spectators of the world to task for their harsh judgement of President Bush's achievements. He calls Bush's detractors, "Not just uncharitable but lacking in insight about the way the world works and what has to be done to maintain our way of life." He says, "President Bush has done a great job here in very difficult circumstances, and he does not get due credit", and explains just why...

Pinter won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. Here are some exerpts from his searing denunciation of United States realpolitik in his Nobel Prize speech. Really worth reading...

In 1995, when John Brumby was in opposition, he made a very stirring speech at a forest rally in Melbourne. "... that's what we'll do when we're in government - no more export woodchipping, an industry in the future based on plantations and the proper protection of our high conservation value forests." Unfortunately, it was not true.

US Democrat Barrack Obama and Canadian Social Democrat Jack Layton are just two different kinds of ventriloquists' doll, and the voice we hear through their lips is paid for by Wall Street. It's not what they say; it's who pays them that matters.

Does globalised big-business infotechnology AIM to waste the time of intellectuals so that they cannot contribute to politics? I don't know, but it sure is a side effect of the increasingly lousy personal energy returns on increasingly expensive overly complex STINGY computer hardware and software products.

On top of the hazards of nuclear fission electricity generation, even more environmental threats are posed by mining of uranium, enrichment, reprocessing and disposal of nuclear wastes. A likely consequence of the expansion of uranium mining in Central Australia is that the Eastern seaboard stands to be exposed to clouds bearing poisonous radioactive uranium and other toxic metals blown from the mine tailings dumps (see David Bradbury's film "Blowin' in the wind" for a graphic illustration of this threat).

A recent publication of the Council of Mayors South East Queensland highlights that the mayors of SEQ are seeking help from developers to push the Local Growth Management Strategies (LGMS). These are legal planning documents that force each local government area in South East Queensland to accept unsustainable growth.

Rupert Murdoch's media empire, since it successfully campaigned to bring down the Whitlam government in 1974 and 1975, has similarly abused its power all over the globe in order to ensure that only governments, whose policies are acceptable to it, will remain in office.