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.’ 

‘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.

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.

‘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.’