Remember the inconvenient Al Gore? He’s written a new book entitled The Future – Six Drivers Of Global Change, and was on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show last week (which you can only get here by paying for Murdoch’s Austar/Foxtel channels).
The two brought up the current global system which, as we all know, is inherently flawed. When Jon Stewart said capitalism was a ‘voracious overeater’, Gore launched into an interesting tirade. ‘We have two powerful tools to shape our future. One is democracy, the other is capitalism. And the alternatives to democracy have been tried and found to be disastrous. The alternatives to capitalism have also been not so great. Capitalism as we all know allocates resources efficiently, balances supply and demand, is more conducive with higher levels of freedom and it unlocks a higher level of human potential. But in spite of that, it is now associated with market disruptions which are bigger and more frequent... Short-termism is one example. ‘Thirty years ago stocks were held on average for seven years. That was rational. And now it’s seven months. Here in New York and in London, 60 per cent of the trades on the stock exchange are now made by these algorithmic “flash trades” – it happens in milliseconds. That’s not really investing. So we have a flash crash where the market drops a thousand points and comes back again in 20 minutes and they have no idea why it is happening...’ ‘Capitalism the way it currently operates needs to be reformed’, Gore says. ‘Our democracy has been hacked – it’s been taken over. ‘It no longer operates the way our founding fathers intended it to. Anonymous donors, big corporations, big money, might makes right... the lobbyist and special interest groups are now in control. ‘You can’t do anything without begging for permission and it’s time that we took our democracy back. And it can be done.’
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‘Only the little people pay taxes,’ said the late American billionaire Leona Helmsley in 1983, who ironically spent jail time for tax evasion. Since then, there is little doubt that elaborate tax evasion methods have become more complicated and seemingly less regulated for the super rich and corporations.
Now thankfully the population, at least in the UK, have had enough. US coffee corporation Starbucks has been copping public protests after paying ’no corporation tax in the UK for the past three years,’ The Guardian reports. Along with Amazon and Google, they were accused by a committee of British MPs of an ‘immoral’ use of secretive jurisdictions, royalties and complex company structures to avoid paying tax on British profits. What’s wrong with paying taxes? Let’s be real: government is a type of socialism. We pay taxes because we all use roads and hospitals. It’s considered part of the social contract, a theory that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and in part addresses the authority of the state over the individual. Clearly society suffers when rich individuals and corporations aren’t taxed at comparable rates to an ‘ordinary’ individual. And fewer taxes for the rich fits neatly into the idiotic narrow conservative views peddled by simpletons such as Hockey and Abbott – ie ‘investment will suffer’. There is no evidence to that claim and is simply a scare tactic by the greedy. Also the social contract is not talked about by politicans because by and large they are are failing at it. Greek philosopher Plato is reputed to have said, ‘When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.’ Given that sound logic, stimulating or reviving economies couldn’t be simpler: make super-rich corporations pay more tax by closing the loopholes. Change in the short term here is unlikely of course because the Liberal, Nationals and Labor parties – along with mainstream media – know who their masters are. Since Australia swapped riding the sheep’s back for coal trucks, enormous PR budgets and legislation became necessary to protect resource extraction revenue and quell dissent. Indeed it takes mass collective hypnosis to convince ourselves that the planet should continue to be polluted with fossil fuels when renewable technology is available.
An interesting hiccup in that unevolved narrative was activist Jonathan Moylan’s prank on the NSW coal industry last week; governments and corporations appear confounded and have yet to figure out what to do about his actions. He faked a press release from ANZ to highlight the bank’s complicity and investment in destroying the Leard State Forest, west of Armidale, for mining profits. The result was it temporarily wiped $314 million off Whitehaven Coal shares, which is an ANZ investment. While the government was quick to seize his computer and mobile phone, why haven’t charges been laid? It’s because legal precedent is yet to be established on such activity, Crikey’s Sally Whyte reports. ‘According to Associate Professor Keturah Whitford at the Australian National University’s College of Business and Economics, Moylan could be charged under Section 1041E [of the Corporations Act 2001], but could also face civil action from stakeholders under Section 1041H of the [Corporations] Act. There isn’t an Australian precedent to foreshadow the likelihood of conviction or possible sentences. Whitford says it’s “hard to predict sentencing, but the extent of damage including losses to investors would be taken into account and the fact that he wasn’t personally profiting”.’ Moylan’s inventive media activism is somewhat similar to that of the Yes Men, who use parody and satire to highlight psychopathic corporate behaviour. In the long term, the fossil fuel industry will lose the battle against renewables simply because renewable energy provides a means of production. It’s a simple economic premise not even relevant to environmental destruction. And in case this all sounds too whacky, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said in 2008: ‘CEOs of fossil-energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.’ Well said, can’t wait, bring it on. Woolworths – owner of Dan Murphy’s – is a company that is used to getting what it wants, as Mullumbimby discovered when the supermarket giant insisted on jumping the development queue and built in Station Street before sewer connection was available.
This time, the liquor giant was so confident of securing its Byron licence that it signed a 25-year lease with the owner of the Jonson Street premises before approval. While the state government is ideologically, commercially and politically aligned with developers, the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (ILGA) – which rejected Dan Murphy’s – is thankfully a genuinely independent body. Its chairperson, Chris Sidoti, has been Australian Human Rights Commissioner (1995–2000), Australian Law Reform Commissioner (1992–1995) and Foundation Director of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1987–1992). Can the the NSW planning department’s Joint Regional Planning Panel boast such quality of independence? As some may know, Woolworths also makes significant profit from poker-machine addicts. But a new study by activist group GetUp! says it targets socially disadvantaged areas (see www. getup.org.au/profiting-from-poverty). Farmers squeezed by a tightening supermarket duopoly and alarming suicide rates in the bush are rarely reported in the national press; its newspages are instead filled with colourful full- page ads by Coles and Woolies undercutting each other. With retail, perpetuating the illusion that cheap is always best only serves the retailer and consumer, not the producer. Competition, while a bedrock of western prosperity, has diabolical consequences if it isn’t regulated or examined. One could well expect a renewed liquor licence application from Dan Murphy’s in due course, if not a supreme court challenge. With unlimited legal funds available, why wouldn’t they? Mention Monsanto and most would be aware of the chemical company’s flagship product Roundup, and its pushing of genetically engineered (GE) seeds onto farmers and big agriculture.
But the company has its supporters, such as Bill Gates, who claim that seed engineering can address food, land and water shortages while the global population keeps on booming. Former head of the United Nations World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, is also a fan, says www.economist.com. Is it really a potential saviour in the climate-change age? Unlikely. Something to be suspicious of is its push, via the US government, of its GE seed onto countries that don’t want or need it. According to www.guardian.co.uk, ‘The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.’ The report in January 2011 adds that in other released WikiLeaks cables, ‘US diplomats around the world are found to have pushed GM crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative.’ The extent to which Monsanto pursues unethical behaviour demonstrates that it does not act in the interest of the human species. This is shown in its poisoning of the entire town of Nitro in West Virginia, where it produced Agent Orange. Like all corporations devoid of social responsibility it only exists to maximise profits. The poisonous 40-year legacy of Monsanto will be getting an airing in Mullumbimby, and this co-incides with events being held internationally. Activities will be held in four different venues around town, and kick off with a sign-making day on Tuesday September 11 at the Mullumbimby Community Garden from 10am. Documentaries, organic food and talks are all planned, ending with a street march on Saturday, September 15. For more visit www.occupymonsanto360.org or email byronshirechemicalfreelandcare@gmail.com. Genocide is on our doorstep and it looks like we are complicit. One of our closest neighbours, the West Papuans, are being systematically murdered and enslaved by the Indonesians, says indigenous activist and musician Ronnie Kareni.
It’s a topic we don’t hear much about in the mainstream press, he says, because both Australia and Indonesia benefit from strip- mining the region’s resources and subjugating its inhabitants. To most Australians, it sits to the left of Papua New Guinea. It’s not something I am proud of, but until I met Kareni and Blue King Brown’s Natalie Pa’apa’a, I had little idea about the place. And that appears to be how the Australian and Indonesian governments like it. The ‘free press’ like it as well, because advertisers who pay their wages are also profiting from the mining and rainforest logging, says Kareni. In light of that, it’s always worth thinking about where your next outdoor ensemble originates from. Since the Indonesian military occupation in the 1960s, it’s estimated over 100,000 West Papuans have been killed, according to www.freewestpapua.com.au. But Ronnie says studies from Sydney University in 2009/10 claim it to be around half a million. Its population of 3.5 million has been reduced to around 48 per cent indigenous, with the other half mostly Indonesian. It’s a stark difference to the time before the occupation, he says. Perhaps invading underdeveloped countries is not personal; after all, the indigenous are just getting in the way of expected returns on investments (ROI). Case in point is that the Freeport gold mine in West Papua is one of the largest on the planet. It harks back to the days of King Leopold II of Belgium, possibly the most evil imperialist to ever live. This fucker is responsible for the death of an estimated five to 15 million Congolese around the late 1800s. Eventually he was forced to hand over his private enterprise to the Belgian government, but that wasn’t before he extracted a fortune from the Congo. Initially it was ivory, but after a rise in the price of rubber, he enslaved natives to collect sap from rubber plants. It’s an uncomfortable truth that almost all wealth in human history has been created from slavery and the consumption of finite and polluting resources. Even more uncomfortable is a news cycle generally wasted on petty crime and celebrity gossip. At least we can be thankful that there are other options. To learn more visit www.freewestpapua.com.au. An analysis of how global news corporations control the access to information was aired last week – but chances are most of us in this country didn’t catch it.
Eighty-year-old veteran US journalist Dan Rather told Bill Maher’s Real Time show (available only through YouTube or as a bitTorrent file) that he was sacked in 2004 by his corporate boss CBS after reporting George W Bush’s appalling national service record in the Vietnam war. As records show, Bush went AWOL in the National Guard for a year after being given a plum post because of his family connections. ‘Everybody should be concerned about this,’ Rather said, of censorship and control. ‘There are no more than six – my count is four – who control more than 80 per cent of the true national distribution of news. ‘Now, these large corporations have things they need from the power structures in Washington, whether it’s Republican or Democrat. Big business is in bed with big government, and this has more to do with the average person reads, sees, hears than most people know...’ He goes on to say that the corporatisation and the politicisation of news has led to the trivialisation of the news. There was a time, he says, when corporations saw news, at least in part, as a public service. ‘The firewall between the news division and the corporate structure has now disappeared.’ Maher agreed, and made the point that news was a loss leader (much like the Coles and Woolies milk wars). ‘In the old days, news didn’t have to make money,’ Maher said. ‘The Beverley Hillbillies made money, so that meant you could do what you do.’ Rather added that this was the case for CBS news until fairly recently. ‘With constant consolidation, ultimately under the Viacom flag, that’s when it went all out the window.’ Honest brokers of information are becoming far less fashionable these days, but controlling the flow is not a fait accompli. Basically this means maintaining scepticism and suspending beliefs on all things driven by corporations. The late comedian Bill Hicks said it best: ‘Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America – you are free to do what we’ll tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!’ US Author Derrick Jensen’s philosophy is the catalyst for a film – END : CIV – being shown this week at the Byron Bay Uniting Church.
It’s heartening to know this church wants to expose elite power structures and is a hot-bed for radicalism. Isn’t that what Jesus would want? The film examines our cultural addiction to violence and environmental exploitation through the construct of civilisation. The word civilisation comes from the Latin ‘civilis’, meaning civil, related to the Latin ‘civis’, meaning citizen, and ‘civitas’, meaning city or city-state. The rise of cities is where civilisations start, Jensen says, and as it is a ‘collection of people living in numbers so large that they need to import resources’ that construct is not, or can never be, sustainable. Our way of life is based on violence and slavery, according to Jensen. Our clothes are made largely by slaves from other countries, the meat we consume is farmed without consideration for the animal and diamonds generally have blood on them... And of course there’s our collective unevolved thirst for oil and other non-renewables. He says we don’t see the violence because ‘we’ve been metabolised’ into the system. Additionally, ‘We have bought into a strange notion that it’s ok to have to pay to exist on the planet.’ If you don’t pay rent for example, someone with a gun – or more power than you – will come and enforce compliance. A less emotive and more anthropological analysis of civilisations is by Scott Nearing, author of Civilization And Beyond. To paraphrase his dense and excellent tome in less than 100 words: civilisation is a means of communication, trade and record keeping. It includes an economy based on a division of labour and specialisation. It has a self-selected and perpetuating oligarchy, utilising a unified political and bureaucratic apparatus. It requires an adequate labour force to farm, transport and mine, while it supports a large middle-class element of professionals, technicians and semi-parasitic fringe dwellers. A well trained and financed military for both offence and defence is essential, along with institutions and social practices. And lastly, agreed-upon religions that maintain social conformity. Perhaps the biggest story not covered by the media is the sale of Australian property and farms to overseas corporations.
A recent report by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) claims there is no registration of a sale unless it exceeds $244m. This includes both property and business/farm sales. ABARES notes, ‘Some 44 million hectares, or 11.3 per cent of Australian agricultural land, was wholly or partly owned by foreigners, of which around half had majority Australian ownership.’ Another interesting claim from the report is that it’s the US, not China, that is buying up our land. Crikey’s Bernard Keane also wrote an article on this report, and pointed out that, ‘US investors get special treatment under Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) courtesy of the Howard government’s Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), followed by Malaysia, then the British. Chinese firms had no investment applications at all that year.’ Lynne Wilkinson of Ausbuy weighed into the debate with a recent comparison to New Zealand. ‘They give priority to their own wealth creators and long-term national interests,’ she writes. ‘New Zealand dairy farmers recently won a case in their supreme court to stop the sale of eight dairy farms to China. The case was won on the basis that the long-term economic value of these farms would be lost to the New Zealand economy if foreign interests bought them. In the meantime our governments give subsidies to foreign companies to set up business in competition with local manufacturers (OLAM Singapore almond processing), or sell our assets and intellectual property to foreign interests (Victorian Dairy Research Centre to China) leaving local bidders out.’ The issue of sovereignty can sometimes be confused with being patriotic. The ‘patriot’ concept, however, causes much misery, bigotry and stupidity. Author of How To Make Friends And Influence People, Dale Carnegie, even said of it: ‘Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.’ No, what I am talking about is an understanding by a nation that the land it occupies should be in the stewardship and autonomy of its entire population. Just ask Venezuela, who nationalised their resource sector despite the best efforts of the US. Both our major parties continue to ignore this important issue; the Independents and Greens are the only who have courage to speak up. ‘Byron Bay to Bradley’ was held last week at the Community Centre as part of the Global Days of Actions. It was in solidarity with US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking the WikiLeaks ‘Collateral Murder’ video.
It made international headlines in April – though it was filmed in 2007 – and depicts three airstrikes from a US Apache helicopter in New Baghdad. At least eleven people were killed in the airstrikes, including two journalists working for Reuters. The US army has kept Manning in isolation since his arrest on May 29, according to www.bradleymanning.org, and he needs at least $50,000 to defend himself. He is facing 52 years imprisonment and is under suicide watch. Leaking footage of US soldiers wilfully killing unarmed civilians is more than a military PR nightmare – it highlights humanity’s futile endeavours with wars that are invariably over religion, sovereignty, resources and ideology. US national security was not threatened by this action, however The New York Times reported that Manning is also accused of leaking over 240,000 classified intelligence reports and diplomatic cables involving the war in Afghanistan. That is a threat to US national security, and most likely the reason he will be jailed for most of his life. WikiLeaks defended disclosure of the material, saying transparency is essential to democracy. ‘The Taliban have already stated they are reading the documents, looking for names and will go and kill any Afghan listed as being an informant or connected to those who worked with/for NATO,’ a forum contributor to Manning’s site says. ‘With this security leak, informants now see that they are not safe and fewer – or perhaps none – will be willing to come out with information.’ So is Manning hero or villain? Arguably one of the images that was instrumental in changing the American public’s views on the Vietnam War was of the execution of a Viet Cong guerrilla by South Vietnam’s national police chief. Mainstream media (NBC and AP) captured that moment in 1968, and the comparison with Manning’s helicopter footage is evident. New technologies have the ability to spread over larger areas of population than ever before. It can be dangerous and is a powerful tool, and one that should always be used with extreme care so it doesn’t endanger lives. Anything that ends wars, un-winnable or not, is in humankind’s ultimate interest. It’s probably the reason the mothership hasn’t arrived from outer space yet. As George Carlin said, ‘we are but monkeys with baseball caps and machine guns.’ |
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