On February 24, Mike Burgess, the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) broke with tradition and had the media over when he gave his annual threat assessment…
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Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
RWNJs [Right Wing Nut Jobs] who lost their biscuit when [Adam] Goodes called out a 13 yr old girl for her racism smoothly segued into abusing a teenage girl for her climate activism, and then launched an attack accusing a 9 yr old with a disability of scamming the public. And they didn't pause to take breath.
Most people who read beyond the headlines will have seen or heard about last Monday’s edition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners investigative journalism show. It documented the coverup…
Respected journalist Paul Bongiorno had a go online at Finance Minister Mathias Cormann for his consistent lying, saying that if you are going to lie, make it a big one….
George Calombaris’ restaurant empire has collapsed, is now in administration and his twelve restaurants are up for sale. Because of this collapse, about 400 staff are now out of work1….
It might seem bonkers that some of the worst climate-change deniers seem committed to blaming "greenies" for the holocaust on the eastern seaboard. But it makes a sick kind of sense. Somebody has to take the blame and they’ll be damned, literally, if it has to be them. So in a twist, they blame those who have been trying to save us from hellfire.
A colleague of mine posted a meme on Facebook concerning new postage stamps being issued to celebrate Brexit, the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (EU). There…