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Hmmm, what to say? This would be my words on a good day if I had tried to encapsulate my thoughts on the current time in politics. Where we are as a nation, what is the most important things to consider and where we should be going? This article nails it.
With the ongoing collapse of corporate media’s influence, the next step is to finish the job and sever the public’s loyalty to habitual voting, which is one of the remaining bastions of corporate influence on the public. Constant encouragement to consider policy before the party will help to regain and improve the power of a true democracy in Australia.
Ian H
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Brilliant work. Modern Monetary practice is made clear.
Josephine P
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I am absolutely 💯 per cent sure that Dutton would not make a decent prime minister. He is dodgy, deceitful, and an out-and-out liar. He snuggles up to billionaires, and the coalition is all leftovers from previous dodgy governments. Vote no for this man.
Malcolm M
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Australia should form alliances with our neighbours like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. The USA, especially under Trump, is unstable and a threat, especially in light of Trump’s dubious connections to Putin.
John H
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And let us not forget the CIA overthrowing our PM Gough Whitlam for wanting to close the US Military Base Pine Gap, then again PM Kevin Rudd for the same reason.
Vee W
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Military Spending vs Social Services: Australia’s Paradox: I noted WITH CONCERN, that a lot of the facts & “figures” quoted in this article are PRE-LABOR Parliament, i.e. LNP Federal Parliament DECISION!
I do not believe this article presented the TRUTH regarding Labor’s unrelenting pursuit of repairing Social and Public Housing, Lowering P.A.Y.E. taxes, raising REAL wages, lowering child-care fees, Hospital waitlists, and lowering/abolishing Tertiary Education costs, which the LNP all wholeheartedly eviscerated in their last Term in Office. FAIR GO, MATE!
Josephine H
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I live in one of Qld’s top 20 most socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs. My children were educated here and have done well as adults. My grandchildren are in primary school here. They have attended a public school, a private school in the suburbs, and a private school in another area. My comments are based on what I have witnessed in my grandchildren’s education.
Schools are parents in place for all students. They are obliged to protect their safety, physical and mental. They fail miserably for all the reasons you have mentioned. So many children are traumatised by bullying, physical intimidation, and chaotic classroom environments. In respect of learning supports not being available, this is most critical for the early years. Preppies all need support.
If a parent fails to ensure their child’s needs are met, resulting in emotional and/or physical trauma, then Child Safety steps in. How is it that education providers are not held to the same standards? In our suburbs, there are many refugees because of public housing. These children have complex support needs. Yet our schools are expected to meet these needs without adequate resourcing and support.
This is not equitable and affects the quality of education our kids can access. We have a Family and Children’s Commission, which is an advocacy body, yet they are unable to speak on behalf of these children. Governments in their wisdom created these ghettoes of traumatised children. Then these children have few local schools to access, all under-resourced.
A good advocate could make a good case for the needs, but no authority figure will intervene. Personally, I believe it is time for a legal action against the education department for its failure to provide safety and the necessary support to these students. They have a legal obligation not to harm these children. They are failing. The education system is abusing these students.
The Department in Qld used to skirt its obligations by saying children were entitled to the education the Minister deems fit!
Enough is enough.
Bev P
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There is NOTHING as costly as warfare or military kit. In 4 short years of warfare during WW1, four empires collapsed. Imperial Russia, Imperial Germany, Ottoman Empire & Austria-Hungary Empire, Gone. The Brits came out of it lurching about like a drunk man and didn’t survive WW2.
In 2010, Germany paid off its debt from WWI and WW2. In 2006, Britain paid off its WW2 debt. In 2014, Britain paid off its WW1 debt.
It takes generational neglect to beggar a nation. In 1950, the USA was the envy of the world (unless you were black or First Nations). Since then, successive governments have squandered the nation’s wealth on warfare and military expenditures. As a result, the USA has the social indicators of a banana republic. Bravo!
Since WW2, the evangelical USA has maintained the world’s most expensive military, capable of warring with Secular USSR and Secular China at the same time. The USA spends between 18% and 43% of its GDP on the military. The USA spends $860+ billion a year on war.
Military expenditures come at a cost to social services such as health, education, and youth services. In many cases, these services were won by popular movements participating in protest, lobbying, and industrial action. Americans routinely label such activities as Marxist, Communist, Socialist, and radical left-wing.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranks countries into four tiers of human development by combining measurements of life expectancy, education, and per-capita income into the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) in its annual Human Development Report.
The United States of America ranks 28th in this list of countries alongside Poland and Cyprus. Its position is deteriorating. The nations consistently recording in the Top five are Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.
Wages are the standard measure of working conditions. Although the USA has the second highest Average wage, the difference between Daddy Warbucks’ income and that of a waitress in a diner is phenomenal, and there are a far greater number of waitresses or their equivalents.
Also, without access to free universal healthcare, education, and legal representation, which is commonly available in most developed nations, American workers’ wages do not rank well.
America emasculated labour unions between the 1930s and the 1950s. As a result, American working conditions are third-world compared to other developed nations.
Unfortunately, much of America’s industries and wealthy individuals profit from slavery. It is estimated that there are presently 400 thousand slaves in the USA. Illegal immigrants have no recourse to the law. They cannot complain if –
* they are working in a dangerous or toxic workplace,
* their employer pays them little or nothing;
* their employer withholds wages for alleged infractions; and
* their employer sexually harasses or rapes them.
In effect, the disparity between rich and poor is huge. At the moment, the USA health system is under stress. Schools are underfunded & unable to support special needs students or tailor lessons to suit individuals, and police are lurching from one catastrophe to another.
Pre-COVID America recorded –
* an extreme poverty index of 5.5%, equivalent to Egypt, Palestine, Tonga and Kyrgyzstan;
* American homelessness is phenomenal, with at least 550,000 homeless people, commented upon by international visitors constantly.
* a literacy rate of 86%, ranking 125th of 195 nations alongside Syria and Zimbabwe. About 30% of USA adults are functionally illiterate; they cannot read or complete an online job application, so they don’t work. They cannot read a ballot paper, so they don’t vote. Education & literacy are the major drivers of crime;
* a homicide rate of 5.0 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, similar to Cuba (4.99), Kenya (4.93) and Sudan (5.16), compared to the UK (1.2), Italy (0.57) or Australia (0.89)
* Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the USA gun-related homicide rate is 25 times higher than the OECD countries COMBINED, but is ranked at number 30 behind a list of failed states.
* American Judicial services are stretched beyond capacity and so stressed by the constant violence they overreact regularly.
* The USA has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. With 655 inmates per 100,000 of population, the USA is by far the leader among large, industrialised nations in incarceration. At any one time, there are 2 MILLION people in USA jails, 50 THOUSAND in solitary confinement and another 4.4 MILLION under other forms of judicial restraint. Soviet gulags were nothing compared to the USA judicial system today.
* generally accepted existence of slavery in illegal immigrant Latino workers at USA industrial complexes, armaments manufacturing plants and wealthy private individuals. There are an estimated 400 THOUSAND slaves in the USA today;
* government-sanctioned murder, being one of only 20 nations still executing people in 2019;
* a standard of living placement at number 15, flanked by Estonia and Japan;
* an average life expectancy of 78.9 years, on par with Lebanon and Cuba, ranked 38th of 186 nations studied. Birth mortality is SIX TIMES that of the EU, and other health indicators are similarly dreadful;
* 45000 Americans die every year because they can’t afford healthcare. The leading cause of bankruptcy is medical bills.
I shudder to think what those figures look like now. In effect, the USA has all the social hallmarks of a banana republic, perhaps worse. This is what a laissez-faire approach to economic management looks like.
The third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) is probably the earliest author to systematically address counter-insurgency in his writings.
In his Reflexiones Militares, published between 1726 and 1730, he discussed how to spot early signs of an incipient insurgency, prevent insurgencies, and counter them, if they could not be warded off.
Strikingly, Santa Cruz recognized that insurgencies are usually due to genuine grievances: “A state rarely rises without the fault of its governors.”
As a result, the USA experiences, on average, two significant episodes of civil unrest per annum. No government experiences a revolution that does not deserve it.
America should be the wealthiest nation in the world, as it was in 1950 when China commenced dragging itself out of the mire. Instead, a cabal of armaments manufacturers and religious zealots has squandered the nation’s wealth on constant religious wars and military hardware.
America is no longer a democratic republic but instead a fundamentalist religious state, such as those in the Middle East.
The USA is militarising itself to death
▶️ Watch this reel https://www.facebook.com/share/r/MoMCL5LxvB8vFCSP/?mibextid=5F9MXnAndrew P
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I am in agreement with the premises but find little use in the very large list of examples of how we have degraded our planet and continue to do so.
Part of the problem is that the human species has shown over the approximately 10,000 years that we have records of our activities, that we are not very good forward thinkers. And how and why should we be? The average human life span today is 80 years, of which the first and last 20 years we are not in charge of much about our lives. Go back to prehistoric times, and our agency is barely 10 to 20 years old. In our early history, there was no formal history or education. We looked through a very narrow tunnel at the world around us.
Approximately 3000 years ago, we started to gather the necessary history and technical learning that has propelled us to today. Both these activities, the study of history and technical learning, were almost completely unavailable to the vast majority of the population.
By this accident, we have almost completely and irreparably locked in the bias of the wealthy and set the aspirations of mankind only on the accumulation of wealth. Only in a few technologically primitive agrarian societies that could still live a simpler life in relative comfort did hunter-gatherers survive.
We are cursed with our fecundity. You are hard-pressed to find any analysis of a very simple fact about the human population. In 1900, our population was just under 2 billion. Today it is 4 times greater at 8 billion. In that one simple statistic is the core of our current problems which does not have any government looking for a solution. The planet is heaving with our species and we are raping every natural resource that is available.
David Attenborough has presented compelling evidence of the rapidly decreasing snow cover of the Himalayas. In his estimate, the Himalayas may be devoid of snow in a few hundred years. When that happens, the Ganges and the Mekong will fail, and 3 billion people will lose their water supply, homes, and livelihoods.
Alerting people to the problems all over the world is important but far more important is to completely change human thinking. Any mechanism to do so cannot be voluntary.
Roger F
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I am most concerned about rapidly developing climate change. I believe that neoliberalism has a lot to do with the development of global warming and climate change. It has emphasised getting and spending and individual advancement at the expense of concern for the future. The getting and spending add to emissions, making the warming worse.
Jock C
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Reagan and Thatcher started the process, and each successive government has continued down the same path. It is refreshing to see someone at last calling for change to a system that has failed us all. The execution of an insurance company executive in the USA highlights the extent to which the insurance industry (once a mutual society structure) has fallen victim to corporate greed. The sooner we cast off the shackles of the neoliberal economic model, the better off we will be. Australia is a resource-rich country; however, the wealth extending from exploiting those resources is not equitably distributed, with far too much going to overseas investors.
John H
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Well done on a much-needed, balanced, informative and educational article.
I have written extensively about these issues, as per my website – Don Morris Author https://www.donmorrisauthor.comDon M
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This article has reinforced my feelings about a strong “Independent” member. Both the ALP and especially the LNP coalition have let the electorate down with watered-down commitments to corruption and politician “rorts” for mates. That is not to say the Greens have not gained many friends with their hard-line attitude to Labor’s housing proposals.
Paul C
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My take on the current setup is that we must remove the “Shareholder Imperative”!
Business 101 used to be “Customer is King,” and social, legal, ethical, and moral constraints governed what CEOs were prepared to do to garner shareholder approval through share price rises and dividend payments.
Then we hit the “Greed is Good” ethos, and all constraints regarding customers, employees, and society were sacrificed to the vicious cycle of ever-increasing shareholder reward for CEO salary and bonuses, elimination of business risk through legal/financial/structural manipulation and inter-business collusion, and abrogation of any social, moral, or ethical constraints in pursuit of riches!
We can no longer view big business toxicity as “a few bad apples.” We must assume they are malign and antisocial entities until they demonstrate otherwise.
David W
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