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07/03/2025

Anti-Semitism- a perspective

6 March 2025

There is currently a rush towards the banning of hate speech and a demand for action on antisemitism, but far less emphasis on Islamophobia.

In Australia, we have been a relatively wealthy country where everyone has had a fair go. With a large number of migrants relative to most counties we have been seen as a relatively tolerant society by world standards.

When I grew up, there were large numbers of ‘displaced persons’ (refugees) who had come from Europe after the war. They were from Greece, Italy, Turkey, the Baltic states, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, as well as ‘ten pound Poms’. Anglo-Australians called them ‘wogs’, ‘wops’, ‘Eyties’, Poms or various other names. There were no anti-discrimination laws, so the migrants mainly copped the abuse and worked hard in their new land so that their children would have all the opportunities.

Australia was welcoming in the sense that behind our tariff barriers everyone had jobs at the level that mostly only the father had to work, though women mostly could if they wanted to. There were few private schools, so most kids went to public schools and grew up together and prejudice mostly died out amongst them because of their common experiences. The government Housing department built whole suburbs of houses and leased them at reasonable rents and later they could buy the houses that they had lived in for years. Some migrants set up ethnic clubs based on their homelands and soccer teams were initially racially based as Australia played cricket or rugby. There was some trouble between Serbs and Croats with a shop in Western Sydney memorably burned down, and Sydney Water knew not to have Serb and Croat gangs in the same depots, but mostly things were peaceful.

Other notable migrant groups have been Vietnamese after the Vietnam war and Chinese after Tiananmen Square, but these were on a lesser scale.

Jews were mostly not noticed, but they set up their own Schools, which sang the national anthem of Israel and hoisted an Israeli flag. They were also quietly active in politics, working against any politician who took a pro-Palestinian line.

I can tell my own story here. I spoke at a refugee rally in Hornsby when I was an Australian Democrat in NSW Parliament and pointed out that terrorism was a political and military technique used generally by the weaker side against the stronger, and who was the terrorist depended on the time and your perspective. The political Zionist movement had grown up in the 1890s and managed to get the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine. After WW2 there were many displaced Jews and the Zionists did terror raids against the British who had inherited control of Palestine. Famously, they bombed the King David Hotel, killing the British general there and destroying all the records of the Zionists terrorists that were stored there. The war-weary British, having nowhere else to put the Jewish refugees, gave up and let them go to Palestine in 1946, despite the objections of the Palestinians, who did not actually have their own government, having been a colony ceded from Turkey to Britain. The Zionists then organised, and ‘Declared the State of Israel’ in 1948, even though Jews were still only 36% of the population. The surrounding nations declared war on the new state and the UN did not recognise it, but they were well organised, bought some leftover tanks from Romania and repelled their attackers. They also killed some Palestinians causing many others (about 750,000) to flee. This was termed the Nakba in the Arab world and is considered ethnic cleansing and equivalent to the Holocaust. The Israeli government then declared that any unoccupied land belonged to the State and could be given to whomever the State wanted. Palestinian land title was not recognised and land was given for ‘settlements’ to Jews who came to Israel and who were willing to take this land and fight the Palestinians who might resist the loss of land that was formerly theirs. The Palestinians were then termed terrorists, and this nomenclature has persisted in Western political definitions and media ever since, as Israel has progressively taken over land formerly owned by Palestinians.

The Jewish lobby in Australia has been very pro-Zionist. After my speech in Hornsby, at which I said some of the above, I was approached by a person who still posts pro-Israel messages on my FB page. He told me that I was quite wrong, but did not elaborate why.

Some time later, a State by-election was held in Tamworth, a safe National party seat, (rendered even safer by optional preferential voting). A couple of rival local councillors stood as Independents, but without preferences flowing were unlikely to knock off the National. The Democrats had a local candidate, so it was an opportunity to get our name out, so we put her up. We discussed our ‘How to Vote’ card preferences and decided we would put the more favoured of the local rival counsellors, then the other Independents, then the National last. We decided to contact the other 3 independents to decide what order to put them in.

Our ‘How to Votes’ were not going to make much difference, the National was going to get in. We contacted 2 of the independents, but despite our best efforts could not find the third, so we gave up, put him second last and went ahead. The National got in, we got a few percent and the Independent in question got 7 votes.

I was then flabbergasted to see a headline in the Jewish Times, ‘Democrats Support Neo Nazis’. The uncontactable independent had apparently attended an Neo-Nazi rally in Melbourne 20 years before and had not been seen since, and we had put him ahead of the Nationals. But the Jewish lobby had kept track of him as well as my speeches and it was pay-back time.

Another example of their power was in 2003. Both the Sydney Peace Foundation and the Dept of Peace and Conflict studies at the University of Sydney advocated the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. The Sydney Peace Foundation awarded the Sydney Peace Prize to Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian who had worked for peace in Israel. The head of the Foundation, Prof Stuart Rees contacted all his sponsoring companies to tell them that he intended to do this to be sure that they did not pull their sponsorship. They all assured him it was up to him to award the prize, they would not interfere. When it was announced the Jewish lobby was very upset and said that he had to withdraw the prize and give it to someone else. Rees refused, saying that Foundation would have no credibility at all if he did this. Bob Carr, the Premier, awarded the Prize, but all the sponsoring companies left. Some apologised, some did not. When Rees stepped down, new Board members ended the BDS campaign. The Dept of Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University was degraded from a Department to a course within the Arts faculty after it also supported Palestine.

The Greens have been relatively pro-Palestine and ran a BDS campaign associated with the local Council elections in Marrickville. The Green candidate for mayor had done quite well and was tipped as quite likely to beat the Labor candidate. They had enough money for a billboard campaign. Zionists defaced all their posters. The vandal was caught, but had a clever lawyer who found some previously unnoticed problem with the billboard and got off on a technicality. Vandalism not terrorism? Labor won narrowly.

The IDF, Israeli ‘Defence Force’ has flattened Gaza to a demolition site and killed an estimated 49,000 Palestinans, and now have been attacking Palestinans on the West Bank. Most recently they are stopping food aid getting into Gaza because the Palestinans want a lasting peace, rather than just a ceasefire extension, which would give the Israeli hostages back, but without a guarantee that the one-sided fighting would not resume.

Hamas fighters are always referred to as Hamas militants; even on the ABC because the Americans have classified Hamas as a terrorist organisation and our government has followed. I wonder if our major political parties would have dared not to. Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Gaza because the Palestinian Authority was justly seen as corrupt and unwilling to stand up to Israel. It seems that the kickbacks from property development in Ramallah were too great a temptation.

Recently we have seen some examples to the Jewish lobby pulling Australian society into line:

Antoinette Lattouf was taken off the air by the ABC 2 days into a 5 day contract because she had done a pro-Palestinian social media post. It seems that there was a tsunami of complaints that went right to the top of the ABC within 2 days! I wonder who coordinated that? The case continues in Court- she will probably win her unjust dismissal case. (ABC News 27/2/25)

The artist selected by Creative Australia for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Khaled Sabsabi was dropped because he had made an artwork in 2006 about the Sept 11 attacks in New York and in 2007 a video about a Hezbollah leader. Artists like to think that they can make political statements as part of their work, rather than Art having a purely decorative function. It seems not. (ABC News 14/2/25)

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has suspended an $870,00 grant to pro-Palestinian academic, Randa Abdel-Fatteh, who was given the money for her study, ’Arab/Muslim Australian Social Movements since 1970’. She had made recent anti-Israel comments. No lesser person than Federal Arts Minister, Jason Clare, contacted the ARC. (SMH 1/2/25)

Two nurses, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdehon were stood down and charged for allegedly ‘wanting to kill Israeli patients’. It is, of course, not at all in keeping with the medical tradition, which is to treat your enemies the same as you treat your own side. Their social media video came to light and was given publicity by an Israeli ‘social media influencer’, Max Veifer. (SBS News 26/2/25)

The National Gallery of Australia had a display of indigenous art and part of the display including suppressed indigenous peoples had a Palestinian flag. The Palestinian flag was covered after complaints. Some in the arts community were offended by this official censorship. (www.pedestrian.tv/news/nga-covers-palestinian-flags-in-artwork/).

You might ask who kept track of the Independent candidate for theTamworth by-election for 10 years and arranged the story about the Democrats, who pressured the companies to stop sponsoring the Sydney Peace Foundation, who made the phone calls to high places to complain about journalist Lattouf, artist Sabsabi and researcher Abdel-Fatteh, who found the social media post of the nurses and amplified it, and who complained about the Palestinian flag in an indigenous art exhibition at the National Gallery?

Clearly there is a lot of money and effort going into pressuring politicians and civil organisations that dare to take an anti-Israeli perspective, no matter how Israel behaves. There has been not a word from the Jewish establishment in Australia in favour of the Palestinians. Some of my Jewish friends who have urged reconciliation with the Palestinians have been quite outcast from mainstream Jewish society in Australia, and called names like ‘self-hating Jews’. Being a long way from the action, Australian Jewry seems to echo the most militant elements of Zionism, and are quick to play the ‘anti-semitism’ card with politicians, without acknowledging why anti-Israel sentiment might be rising. The Palestinian death toll in Gaza and now the West bank and the International Criminal Court talking of war crimes and genocide seems to make no difference. The Holocaust ended 80 years ago, the Nakba was 77 years ago, but has continued to a lesser extent until this Gaza war which is a real and ongoing problem. Australia’s politicians are very afraid of the Jewish lobby, and as in the US, it may be the case that no party can win without its support. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that systematic funded interference in the way Australia is governed is likely. Will I be safe after writing this piece? Is a fatal car accident more likely?

Australia’s neoliberalism, which seems determined to keep government interference to a minimum, makes us a relatively low taxing country. So there is not enough money for realistic welfare, unemployment benefits, Gonski’s plan for equality of educational opportunity, universal health care, or building public housing. Yet we subsidise negative gearing for middle class property speculators, private health insurance and private education for those who can afford it, in the land of the supposed ‘fair go for all’. We give tax breaks to religious institutions. Jewish schools raise the Israeli flag and sing the national anthem of Israel. I wonder how a Muslim school would fare if it raised a Palestinian flag? Is there a Palestinian national anthem?

The reason I make the point about our welfare system is because Australia managed to absorb huge numbers of post WW2 migrants because everyone had a job and housing, and nearly all the children went to public schools and had similar early life experiences. There were no anti discrimination laws or commissioners but minimal problems. This assimilation was not merely because we are all nice people and have a nice climate. Social policies promoted inclusion. We have now moved away from inclusive policies to ones that cheerfully tolerate disadvantage and the segregation of society into advantaged and disadvantaged groups, which are likely to be divided by race and religion as well as by economic factors.

There is increasing ghettoisation in western Sydney and pro-Islamic groups are looking at standing Federal election candidates to counteract what they see as pro-Israeli views in the Australian political system. There seems that there is a lot more concern about anti-Semitism than Islamophobia, though this is rising similarly.

It is all very well to pass anti-hate laws and ban Nazi salutes to control extremist political rallies, but to get a harmonious egalitarian society we need to stop subsidising things that divide us, and start paying for things that will lessen division and give equal opportunities for all in a secular society.

27/01/2025

NDIS and Health System in Crisis- what is the answer?

27 January 2025

The health system has been in crisis for years and now NDIS is the same.
State and Federal governments are locked in crisis talks, and now the NDIS is over budget and looking to ‘transfer services’ to other parts of the health system.
Why does all this go on, and what is the solution?
The short answer is that there are many sources of health funding and the main policy objective of all of them is to transfer the cost to someone else, and if they are a private source, to maximise the profit.
This ‘transfer costs’ imperative means that no one is concerned about the overall cost, merely their bit of it.
The major players are still the State and Federal government. In simple terms the States look after the hospitals and the Federal government looks after non-hospital services.
Medicare is being starved and pays less and less to doctors relative to inflation. The private health funds pay what they have to, the CTP (Motor Accidents) and Workers comp systems are either private or use a private model and pay as little as they can get away with and the patient pays the gap, unless they decide that private health insurance is not worth the money, which in most cases is true, and get a bit of Medicare and pay the rest.

Examples of cost shifting are easy to find. The Federal government has let Medicare rebates to GP fall to 46% of the AMA fee. It was 85% when Medicare started, so many doctors simply don’t bulk bill and charge a fee. So people go to the Emergency Departments that are free, but funded by the States. A visit to the ED is 6x more expensive than a GP visit, but the Federal government has shifted the cost to the States, so they don’t care. When you go to the ED and get a script, the hospital used to give you all the drug course. Now they give you a few tablets and a script for a pharmacy outside. The script was needless, and generates the costs of the trip to the pharmacy, the pharmacists fee, the PBS Federal government contribution and the patients script fee. A lot of wasted time and money, but the State saved a bit. When you went to the ED, you used to be followed up in a hospital outpatient clinic where the consultant was paid a sessional fee and oversaw registrars checking the cases and learning. You could also just book and go to a specialist clinic. These have largely been stopped to save the State money. Now you go to the specialists’ rooms and the State saves money, but the total cost per visit is much more.

If you look at the overall efficiency of health systems, Medicare as a universal system has overheads of about 5% counting the cost of collecting tax generally. Private health insurance overheads in Australia are about 12%, Workers comp 30% and CTP over 40%. These figures are approximate and very hard to get, because the dogma is that competition drives down prices, when clearly the system is more efficient if there is a single paying entity. Interestingly, the Productivity Commission made no attempt to quantify these overheads when it looked at the cost of the health system- you may ask why. The point is if you take out profits, which are the same as overheads from the patients’ point of view, and make everyone eligible, you do not have to have armies of insurance doctors, investigators, lawyers and tribunals to see if the insurer has to pay or if it can be dumped on Medicare and the patient.
As far as foreign people using the system are concerned, universal Medicare for people living in Australia is administratively simple, and the cost of treating tourists who have accidents is cheaper than policing the whole system. Enforcement has quite high costs.

In terms of the cost of insurance, US schemes vary from 12-35%R, with the high costs ones being most profitable as they police payouts more thoroughly and naturally refuse more treatments. Note that the CEO of Unitedhealthcare in the US was recently shot, with the words ‘deny’ and ‘delay’ on the cartridges used. Surveys have shown that 36% of people in the US have had a claim denied. Claims are accepted here, but in a survey of my patients 60% of my scans and referrals of CTP patients were denied by NRMA. i.e, We accept the claim, but deny the treatment.

What Is needed is a universal system, free at the point of delivery.
What about over-servicing? The current system makes trivial problems of people with money more important than major problems of people without money. Underservicing is the major problem with ambulance ramping at EDs and long waiting lists.
In a universal system, which doctor is doing what is immediately accessible, with comparisons to every other doctor doing similar work. It is just a matter of checking up on the statistical outliers.

The problem is simple. The major political parties are given donations by private health interests to let Medicare die. Combine this with the Federal/State rivalry that makes cooperation very difficult and a reluctance to collect tax and you have the recipe for an ongoing mess.

The NDIS is an even bigger mess. It is a privatised unsupervised welfare system that arbitrarily gives out money and is subject to massive rorting.

The welfare system that looked after people with disabilities, both congenital and acquired by age or circumstance had grown up historically in institutions that were fossilised in their activities and underfunded to prevent expansion or innovation. People with disabled children looked after them with whatever support they could find. As these disabled cohorts reached middle age, their parents, who were old, were worried about what would happen when they died and wanted to lock in funding for their adult children before they died. They were an articulate lobby group with real problems and were quick to point out the flaws in the existing systems. They visited institutions that had no vacancies and thought that they had put their names on waiting lists. But no central list existed, and the institutions tended to give their beds to whoever came first when a death created a vacancy. ‘Just give us a package, and we will decide how to spend it’ was the parents’ cry. But then NDIS experts came in and interviewed people and gave away ‘packages’ based on an interview. A new layer of experts was created. District nurses or others who might have been able to think of more innovative or flexible options, or who could judge who in their area needed more than someone else had no input. People with real disabilities were given money, but did not know how to assess providers, so dodgy operators snapped up the packages, delivering dubious benefits. The government had no serious regulation or control system. Now the cost of NDIS has blown out, so the solution is to narrow eligibility and force people off the NDIS and onto other parts of the health system. Sound familiar? People with disabilities and their relatives are naturally worried; and rightly so. The lack of these services was why the NDIS was created. The answer is to have universal services. Set a standard, make it available and police quality in the system. Private interests may have a place, but there is no need for profits, non-profit organisations have been the mainstay of providers for years. For profit providers tend to cut costs, which in practical terms means either services or wages or both to concentrate on shareholder returns. The best way to allocate resources optimally is to empower the people actually doing the job, who also have the advantage of being able to see relative needs as they go about their routine work.

An interesting tome on the subject is ‘The Political Economy of Health Care’ by Julian Tudor-Hart, which looked at the changes in the British National Health System from when it started as an idealist post-war initiative run by those working in it with management overheads of about 0.5%, to when it was fully bureaucratised with overheads of about 36%. He was also responsible for the ‘’Inverse care law’ which is the principle that the availability of good medical or social care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served. This inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.

The key point of that people have been taught that governments are hopeless and that you should pay as little tax as possible, so instead of good universal services being developed, a market has developed which is on its way to an American system.. People all agree that the US has the worst system in the developed world at delivering health care. But they overlook the fact that the US health system is the world’s best at turning sickness into money. That is what it was designed to do and that is why it is sustained and maintained. The same drivers are all here.

Note the Federal/State bickering in the article below (and weep).

My recipe for change is to have a Swiss style of government where the people can initiate binding referenda on governments and could simply answer a question like ‘Do you want to pay 5% more tax to have a universal health and welfare system?’ If a question like this got up against the doomsayers, we might have a chance. But of course the change to the constitution to get the referenda in the Swiss model is almost impossible to achieve, the Swiss having been discarded when the Australian Constitution was written in about 1900.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2025/01/25/exclusive-albanese-shut-down-hospital-talks-pressure-states?utm_campaign=SharedArticle&utm_source=share&utm_medium=link&utm_term=VT5jI6Zo&token=Z3cA3Py

15/12/2024

Banks Charging $3 a withdrawal- the logical end of capitalist thinking?

11 December 2024
Once upon a time banks functioned to store your money safely giving you some interest for the use of it or lending it to you for a bit more interest.
Then the government made a quick buck by selling the bank to people who had the money to buy shares.
Then the concentration of wealth changed so that most of the money was held by fewer people. And technology changed and the people with the most money used the new higher tech ways of banking.
And then there was less profit in the little people.
And the accounting changed, the CEO salaries went from several tens of multiples of the normal people’s salaries to hundreds of times. But they had to show results to the shareholders to justify this.
So they closed most of the branches and replaced them by Automatic Teller Machines to save all those rents and staff salaries.
And they decided that even to stock the ATMs was too expensive so they put fees on them to use them, but they got criticised for that, so they lessened the number of ATMs, which saved even more.
A few people actually still wanted to go to the few branches left and wait until they could get to the reduced service, but the accountants said that the return on capital to the shareholders from this aspect of operations was not as much as the returns on internet transactions. Clearly the shareholders wanted ‘user pays’ in every aspect of the business so the banks decided to make these little folk pay a fee to get their own money, as had been so successful with the ATMs.
And no one even commented that the function of banks was to provide a service of looking after people’s money, the question was really how to ensure that the shareholders’ returns could be maintained.
And they all lived happily ever after.
THE END

15/12/2024

Nuclear Power

13 December 2024
In the Nuclear power ‘debate’ Dutton is using the exact words of a nuclear power lobbyist who I heard at a Royal Society meeting last year. He says in essence that all the other countries have nuclear, so we need it too, which is silly in that we have far more renewable energy than they do.

So the message is the that Liberals have given in to the nuclear lobby, because of course a couple of nuclear power plants are necessary for the AUKUS submarines, though both Liberal and Labor have been carefully avoiding this fact, as they know that the Australian people currently do not support either nuclear power or AUKUS submarines and they want to get us to accept it all in two bites rather than one.

The hasty inquiry into nuclear energy, which I flagged last month conspicuously did not have the AUKUS submarines mentioned in the their terms of reference despite the fact that in discussions about the AUKUS submarines it was mentioned that Australia will need two nuclear reactors larger than the Lucas Heights one, and a lot more trained nuclear scientists and technicians. Labor just wants the Committee to find nuclear electricity unnecessary and criticise the Liberals.

The sad reality of our two party duopoly is that when one side is voted out, the other comes in with all the policies it wants to bring in. So if you dump Albanese because he did not do much and you think Dutton can help (not a view I support), you get nuclear whether you wanted it or not.

In countries such as Germany , where Winston Churchill wrote the constitution so that no single party could ever get a majority, they have to get coalitions so that each issue has to get considered on its merits. It is not a winner takes all and gives all the policies of whichever lobby group has been successful lately. It seems that the Teals are the only hope; the thin Teal line holding democracy

26/11/2024

Social Media Ban misses the point- it’s about Algorithms

25 November 2024

Social media is not a fixed thing to be either accepted or banned.

I was surprised to find my son in favour of a ban, thinking it would stop communications between kids. He assured me that with groups able to be formed easily on WhatsApp, kids could still exchange whatever social relationships or information they liked.

It got me thinking about why social media might be harmful. Presumably kids can gang up more easily as they can all see what others write, just as minority groups can find and reinforce each other for good or ill. But this would also be a problem on WhatsApp.

The key point was one that I made a few posts ago. The object of social media is to keep people online so that they will see the advertising and make money for the social media owner. The way that this is done is to put people in touch with people like them or who believe things like them, particularly if their views are unusual. It is also helpful to upset or disturb people as while they are stimulated they will stay online.

The converse of this is that calming people down, or giving them sensible information has no financial advantage.

What viewers get in their feed is determined by algorithms, which are AI (Artificial Intelligence). These algorithms could be set to give good o]knowledge to anyone who asked for it or was open to it. Google searches often give a series of ads where someone paid to be the first thing found in the search, followed by a ‘top pops’ of replies or hits. It could rate the academic reliability of knowledge sources and give greater weight to more credible sources.

The same principles apply to social media. It is about what the object of the algorithm is, and thus what content it favours and directs.

Algorithms are of course ‘commercial in confidence’ which is code for ‘making money and therefore unable to be accessed or interfered with’. In other words, making money is more important than any social distortions or effects are merely tough luck for those affected.
But it seems to me that a more intelligent approach is needed to social media.

It’s about algorithms stupid!

www.change.org/p/oppose-australia-s-proposed-social-media-ban-for-under-16s

31/10/2024

Why Trump May Win

31 October 2024

The situation is the logical consequence of turning the world into a ‘market’. This was always favoured by big business, but it got turbocharged by the idea that competition for markets caused the two World Wars. Thus the object of world political policy was to turn the world into a market, so that the rich could get richer without wars over markets and virtue would be rewarded.

The US had a huge percentage of world markets and a huge say over it all- what could possibly go wrong?

In a hierarchical system, those at the top set the prices and the wages, whereas those at the bottom are in a perfect market of labour, so take whatever prices and wages they can get. Money therefore movies upwards as in a Monopoly game.

The whole situation was turbocharged by a number of factors. As trade became cheaper, goods travelled and workers competed with workers from other countries, so workers in more developed countries were not able to compete on price and the owners of capital moved their industries to cheaper countries, which gave these countries something of a leg-up, but most of the profit went to the owners of capital. Technology also advanced, so fewer workers were needed to produce anything- mechanisation was here. We could produce much more than we could ever consume. Business developed built-in obsolescence, so goods would wear out or become unfashionable, so they needed to be bought again. Marketing became immensely significant, so we were no longer to consider what we needed, but what we wanted.

Increasingly most of the goods being manufactured needed to be sold, but did not need to be bought. Western consumers were actually in the box seat with all their needs met, so needed to be persuaded to consume for status or whim. Marketing was largely up to the challenge. As Dave Ramsay famously put it, ‘We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like’.

Meanwhile the gap between rich and poor continued to grow between countries and within countries, a general recipe for social and international malaise. The residue of colonialism remains. Nigeria is oil rich, yet its resources are foreign-owned and its main employment industry is scamming. South America has had its governments frequently act on behalf of foreign companies. The result of the problem is seen as ‘illegal migration.’

So just as the inexplicable ‘Brexit’ vote was a longing for an earlier time and a rejection of the Establishment and the status quo, so Trump is seen as a disruptor. He wil tell them all to ‘get fu..ed’ That is enough. He speaks to the pain of rust belt Americans who saw their jobs in steel, cars or manufacturing disappearing through no fault of their own and their standard of living falling. He is a demagogue who tells them what they want to hear. The migrants caused the drug problem, and every other problem. If it is not consistent or even coherent, it does not matter; they listen to the shock jock. Again, technology is relevant. Policy is no longer broadcast, it is selectively narrowcast with truth an early casualty. Trump ads tell Jewish voters that Harris is pro-Palestine while other Trump ads tell Muslim voters that she is pro-Israel. Whatever it takes. The country is very polarised and there is even talk of civil war. Marx believed that revolution would happen in an advanced capitalist system because the logical end point of unfettered capitalism was that a few people would end up with all the money and the majority would be unhappy. (We had better not mention who said this).

The American voting system is as bad as its health and welfare systems. The politicians set the electoral boundaries in a huge gerrymander, and the electoral college gives each state the same voting rights, whether they have large or small populations. The Constitution is fossilised, with 36 Tasmanias, states that are declining relatively or cannot pay their way. These are the States that will determine the election.

The polls are neck and neck in these ‘swing states’, but the betting favours Trump, and the betting has been generally more correct than the polls. A financial friend of mine told me that the bond market is behaving in anticipation of a Trump victory.

Things are not always pleasant, but there is usually an explanation.

20/10/2024

An Explanation of Corruption in the Building Industry

20 October 2024

The key enabler is the privatisation of both the project and the inspectorate.

https://michaelwest.com.au/cfmeu-whistleblower-on-gangsters-unions-and-workers-entitlements/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-10-20&utm_campaign=Today+s+news+from+Michael+West+Media

21/07/2024

Israeli Parliament votes down Two-State Solution 68-9

21 July 2024

Israel has been settling people, largely poorer folk from Eastern Europe on hilltops on former Palestinian occupied land since 1948. Because they did recognise land title before the declaration of the State of Israel, they can claim that no one owns this land, which is of course nonsense, as the Palestinians had been occupying and farming it.

They have continued to pretend that a peace could be negotiated as they gradually took more and more land, and built roads to all the settlements so that the army could come and help the occupiers if the Palestinians resisted. They called the Palestinians terrorists, basically to undermine their legitimacy.

Now there is no land that could be a Palestinian state- there are about 750,000 Jewish settlers in the West bank in fortified villages, and they are educated in Hebrew only, so they cannot go anywhere even if they agreed to.

Israel has pretended for years that there could be a two-state solution because it has been playing for time to make it impossible. Now, because the world is calling out for a peace solution, the Knesset has said that it will not have a two state solution. The Palestinians obviously have nowhere to go. Gaza is rubble and the land on the West Bank is largely Jewish-owned.

Jeff Halper in his book ‘An Israeli in Palestine’ recognised this problem more than a decade ago and said that there would have to be a one-state solution with and post-Apartheid type of reconciliation similar to South Africa’s. Good luck with that now!

It is hard not to believe that the hard right who control the Israeli Knesset wanted the Gazans either to die or to flee to the Sinai, but Egypt did not allow the latter, as they knew that they would be refugees there forever. The Gazans knew it too, though we might wonder what they would choose now as Israel bombs them and blockades them till their children starve.

This is colonialism and genocide more obvious than it has been in public memory, and the Knesset has just shut the door on the peace process that Australia and many other governments have been vainly clinging to.

https://johnmenadue.com/israeli-lawmakers-vote-against-palestinian-statehoodpic-zeev-elkin/

02/06/2024

Religious Update: 2 items from Secular Australia

2 June 2024

Wording of the Census

A battle is brewing between Catholic Church leaders and secular groups over the religion question in the Australian census. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is currently testing whether it would be better to ask “Does the person have a religion?” rather than “What is the person’s religion?”, after 9.8 million people (approximately 40% of responses) indicated in the 2021 count that they had no faith. The new question would have a mark box for both “No” and “Yes (specify religion)”. The bureau is also testing the use of a write-in box for respondents who wish to indicate more detail on their faith, rather than simply picking from a small list of common religions.

The Lord’s Prayer in Parliament House, Victoria

Liberal upper house member Evan Mulholland has placed a motion on the Notice Paper in support of faith leaders who wrote to all members of parliament earlier this month demanding that the parliament continue to observe prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer, at the opening of each sitting day.

It has been 1034 days since the state Labor government promised to replace prayers with something more reflective and appropriate for Victoria’s diverse community.

Victorian Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes has acknowledged the government’s “unmet commitment”.

The flurry of activity – the letter from faith leaders and motions on the Notice Paper – may be a sign that the government is ready to deal with the matter.

Earlier in the year, Mr Mulholland declared that the Liberal Party would “fiercely oppose” any attempt to remove prayer.

Census data show that Christianity has plummeted from 85 per cent of the Victorian population in the 1970s to 41 per cent in 2021. The percentage of people who identified as having no religion at the 2021 Census was 39 per cent.

https://secularism.au/

20/04/2024

Cheaper EVs?

20 April 2024

Here is an article praising China’s Electric Vehicle industry and noting that Apple gave up trying to do EVs and China has successfully taken up the slack.

It also boasts that Chinese EV technology is excellent and that they have not lowered prices, and it warns that trade tariffs to stop Chinese exports will be counterproductive.

More conventional views are that China has a glut of EVs and a coming economic crisis due to their property bubble.

Australia has no tariffs on EVs and is currently paying too much for them. Despite the tone of this article, China must want to dump EVs somewhere.

I am still not sure that EVs are good for the environment in that the carbon footprint from mining and processing their components is much greater than the simpler components of internal combustion engines, and the factories that manufacture them are mainly powered by coal-generated power. It takes many km of petrol saved to overcome this initial deficit. Hopefully this situation will gradually improve in time, but in the shorter term, will Chinese EVs be cheaper here?

What does China’s electric vehicle rise mean for the global market?