Rights of Man

Aug 27, 2009 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values

Rights of Man

Magna Carta 15 June 1215

We know where we stand on a Bill of Rights and we could argue for it but we don’t think we need to any more. John Howard has argued against it and that’s just about enough for us. The little shit has been so wrong about almost everything he has touched as he blundered cynically and sycophantically through his political career that anything he is against is almost certain to be the right thing to do.

…“ Mr Howard said MPs should not hand their decision-making powers to “unelected judges accountable to no-one”.

Just put this beside, say, Howard’s support for Guantánamo and the US military commissions – both legal black holes accountable to no-one but the “unitary Executive”.

Or put it beside the terrorism laws his government introduced, the rolling back of eight centuries of habeas corpus, the fact that the security forces and selected judges and magistrates were/are accountable for their actions not to Parliament and indeed to no-one but the Cabinet ministers, in secret.

The people have no right to know what they are up to. In fact knowing what they are up to, reporting what they are up to or probably even asking what they are up to could land you in gaol. This situation borders on (if it is not already) oligarchy. It is the sort of thing that the French Revolution was fought over, and that the Enlightenment was all about. And it is okay with John Howard.

Actually … where do “the people” fit in, for John Howard?

The idea that a Bill of Rights tears apart the fabric of civil society is a monstrous, cynical joke. Our entire legal and political system is based on bills of rights of one kind or another, in one way or another.

Magna Carta was a Bill of Rights; the English Parliament passed the Petition of Right in May 1628 which referred to rights secured in the reign of Edward III three centuries earlier:

IV. And in the eight-and-twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III, it was declared and enacted by authority of parliament, that no man, of what estate or condition that he be, should be put out of his land or tenements, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.

V. Nevertheless, against the tenor of the said statutes, and other the good laws and statutes of your realm to that end provided, divers of your subjects have of late been imprisoned without any cause showed; and when for their deliverance they were brought before your justices by your Majesty’s writs of habeas corpus, there to undergo and receive as the court should order, and their keepers commanded to certify the causes of their detainer, no cause was certified, but that they were detained by your Majesty’s special command, signified by the lords of your Privy Council, and yet were returned back to several prisons, without being charged with anything to which they might make answer according to the law.

[ … ]

VII. And whereas also by authority of parliament, in the five-and-twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III, it is declared and enacted, that no man shall be forejudged of life or limb against the form of the Great Charter and the law of the land; and by the said Great Charter and other the laws and statutes of this your realm, no man ought to be adjudged to death but by the laws established in this your realm, either by the customs of the same realm, or by acts of parliament: and whereas no offender of what kind soever is exempted from the proceedings to be used, and punishments to be inflicted by the laws and statutes of this your realm; nevertheless of late time divers commissions under your Majesty’s great seal have issued forth, by which certain persons have been assigned and appointed commissioners with power and authority to proceed within the land, according to the justice of martial law, against such soldiers or mariners, or other dissolute persons joining with them, as should commit any murder, robbery, felony, mutiny, or other outrage or misdemeanor whatsoever, and by such summary course and order as is agreeable to martial law, and is used in armies in time of war, to proceed to the trial and condemnation of such offenders, and them to cause to be executed and put to death according to the law martial.

The Howard/Ruddock terrorism laws amount to this description of martial law (and in fact to terrorism themselves). Howard bulldozed all of these hard-fought rights and liberties, the history and traditions of law. And why? Because he believes in his heart that the people can’t be trusted with their own lives? Can’t be trusted with power? That power should remain in the hands of those special few who “understand” it? That rights ought not be defined but should be secret privileges that are in the gift of the few, to be dispensed as the favours of a benevolent ruling elite?

Well, as long as we do have our constitution they are not privileges and they are not in his gift to dispense to the deserving and the compliant and the mates. They are ours and we want them written down and enshrined so that people such as Howard — like the pigs in Animal Farm — can’t take them away.

Amnesty’s human rights act campaign coordinator Jenny Leong says …

“We need to remember that it was under the Howard government that so many of the human rights of this country and our reputation internationally for respecting human rights were eroded,”

she told ABC News Online.

The French declared the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.

The first four Articles are:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

In 1791 Thomas Paine wrote in Rights of Man:

“ The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. 

It is essential to our freedom as individuals and as communities that this sentiment is remembered and written in stone. The agreement by all the people together to form a government and that this government belongs entirely to the people, that political parties are the servants of the people’s government and are not its owners, is the core of our democracy and freedom from tyranny.

 

 

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Aug 25, 2009 | Australian Values, Democracy, Media Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad — Euripides

 

In 2007  we pleaded

 … tell me that America isn’t completely barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, crazy, demented, deranged, dippy, flipped out, fruity, haywire, insane, loony, lunatic, mad, maniacal, manic, mental, nuts, nutty, out of their minds, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwy, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped and whacko.

It is truer today than it was then.

As Glenn Greenwald says this week at Salon,

“ There’s little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era — and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible — both in politics and the establishment media — not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one’s culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

He’s talking about the amazing revelations this week by Tom Ridge, the first head of the US Department of Homeland Security, that he had been pressured for political reasons to raise the terror threat level just before the 2004 elections.

“ [Ridge] wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in ‘The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again’, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

What is extraordinary but not surprising is that those on the US right, now told categorically that they were wrong when they said the government wouldn’t do something like that and that the left were loony conspiracy theorists, take a position something like, “Yes but we were right to be wrong and the left were wrong to be right because, you know, we respected Our President but the left were just Bush Haters.”

Greenwald addressed this craziness in his Salon column this week

“ Ambinder’s belief that there is nothing other than blind “Bush hatred” that could have justified such a belief — and his accompanying self-defense that journalists like him had no way of knowing any of this — is patently false. [A] 2006 Time column by Josh Marshall … details the ample empirical evidence suggesting that “that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”

And [t]here is an exhaustive and lengthy (17 minutes) segment from Keith Olbermann early last year that “weaves from each revelation of an intelligence failure or a Democratic political victory to an almost immediate orange alert or ‘new threat’ from al Qaeda.”

Olbermann’s conclusion after examining all the evidence: “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons” (Olbermann had been raising the same suspicion for many years).

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn’t because it didn’t exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It’s because they didn’t want to see it, because — as Ambinder said — they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest.

It’s because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they’re much more serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

Putting Greenwald’s piece together with the insanity and ignorance of the US health insurance debate it is quite clear that the US is in mental, moral and political free fall. It is thrashing and flailing about for something to hold onto, not knowing where it is going. And it is going into a very dark pit.

 

The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock

Aug 22, 2009 | Australian Values, Border Security, Cultural Values, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values

The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock

An Unfinished Canvas

“ They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them…

Between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes…

And they became forever invisible and they entered into the realm of shadows.

The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Ulairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death…

The Nazgûl came again like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men’s flesh. Out of sight and shot they flew, and yet were ever present, and their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry.

At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war, but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.

Is there a more obnoxious, more simply awful creature than this Nazgûl, Philip Ruddock, whose entire career has been to suck the life out of all around him? In a recent outing he supported the Rudd government’s changes to terrorism legislation like this:

“ … the man who drafted the existing suite of laws, former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, indicated in-principle support for the Rudd government’s changes: “I always saw counter-terrorist laws as an unfinished canvas.”

It is one thing to be a cold and heartless bastard in whose presence blood congeals, water freezes, the sun dims and flowers wither and die; to be a wraith who sucks the breath out of the mouths of babies and who, when he speaks, makes the sound of sand being breathed into his lungs, or of your brain being sucked out of your skull through your ears.

It is another thing to be what many might consider a traitor, if a traitor is someone who is advocates selling or giving away his country’s sovereignty to another.

Everyone can recall, with a shudder, his tenure as the “cold, callous and outrageous” Minister for Immigration, and his equally inhumane, life-sucking time as Attorney General. You may not have heard of “Mr T”, a Vietnamese Australian suffering from mental illness, who was detained three times by Immigration and whom the Nagûl blamed for the horrors that Ruddock and the dark forces of his department visited upon him.

“ In order to excuse himself of any accountability, Mr Ruddock referred to ‘contributory negligence’ and said problems of identification lie when people did not properly identify themselves.

 

“Mr T was well known to the Department of Immigration having been asked to verify his identity on a number of occasions,” said Mr Burke.

 

“When Mr T was detained for the first time in 1999 despite ‘appearing confused’ and displaying signs of mental health problems, he managed to tell the Department of Immigration his full name – with the first two names transposed -, his correct date of birth, his correct address and his sister’s correct phone number. He was identified and released after five days in detention.

 

“Mr Ruddock was the Minister responsible when Mr T was wrongfully placed, yet again, in Villawood for 242 consecutive days in 2003. He was also the Minister responsible when on 22 January, five days into this period of detention, Mr T identified himself as an Australian citizen. Mr T also provided his correct date of birth.” ‘

Ruddock has acted consistently against the rights and interests of Australian citizens. It was Ruddock who was Attorney General when the Howard Government agreed to allow Indonesia to determine Australia’s policy on West Papuan refugees.

It was Ruddock who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for allowing the – at that time – corrupt United States Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and the State Department, and the White House, to determine Australia’s policy on the detention of David Hicks.

It was Ruddock who, as the highest legal officer in the nation, through his terrorism legislation willingly buried the essential concept – and one of Australia’s hardcore values – of innocence until guilt is tested and proven, not to mention habeas corpus, for reasons that can only be guessed but probably include vanity, ambition, pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, cringing Uriah Heepish sycophancy, and just basic total bastardry. Ever so ‘umble.

Stripping away these foundational values of our nation was in our view nothing short of treachery, stupidity, ignorance and a dried and shrivelled morality.

Now Ruddock has formed the grisly view that amounts to this: Australia should allow China to determine Australia’s foreign policy.

If we give away who we are and what we stand for, if we give away the very values that make us Australian, the values that make it worth being an Australian and make being Australian so exceptional, for fear that China might take its money and go home, then Australia is a whore, owned by anyone with enough money and pimped by a politician. A politician, of course, knows exactly what this is all about. The heart of a politician’s art is to say what people want to hear, especially what their masters want to hear. Doing whatever China wants would install China as our master and we would no longer be a free people.

We would no longer be a sovereign people and to agitate for such a condition is to be a traitor to the country and its people.

Well, as a whore, why don’t we go the whole way? China’s politburo seems to define anyone – especially downtrodden minorities – who disagrees with its brutal, inhumane, anti-democratic, racist, butchering regime, Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’, as a “Terrorist”. So why don’t we do as the Nazgûl advises and just tell the Chinese that we agree with them, that we’re not really all that fussed about “democracy” (until they’re ready to let us have it). Why don’t we take their lists of “terrorist organisations” and make them our own, round up Chinese and Chinese-born Australian citizens (same thing to the Chinese) who fit China’s “Terrorist” profile, bulldoze their homes and businesses as the Chinese do and send them back to China for a bullet in the back of the head?

But Ruddock’s not a whore. Whores have feelings.

…and now he was come again, bringing ruin, turning hope to despair, and victory to death.

 

Burma Railroaded

Aug 12, 2009 | Australian Values, Democracy, Humour, OzPol Values, Values

Burma Railroaded

Lord Fopplington-Smythe, Foreign Minister

 

“ Why, stap me, sir! Thou’rt the vewy scoundwel of a knave! And if thou continuest in thy wecalcitwance, why, I might .. I might … flick thee with my perfumed kerchief! Or at the vewy least I shall mightily consider doing so! So there! What sayest thou to that?”

 

– “Get fucked ya mincin’ pansy!”

 

“Ooooh! Thou’rt so stwong and naughty a wogue! Therefore, suh, pwepare thyself for our most fiercest wesponse! We shall gather about our person others of like mind and we shall ALL vewy sewiously consider glowering at thee in the most focused way, wiggling our eyebwows and waving our perfumed kerchiefs at thee in unison! What sayst thou to that, sir?”

 

– “Bugger off, will ya? I’ve got a fuckin’ country to despoil and a still-born democracy to rape.”

 

“Vewy well, suh. Thou sadly leav’st me no alternative but to deploy my most fearsome weaponwy.
Shouldst thou persist in thy vicissitudes I shall not like thee any more and I shall … I shall … I shall … IGNORE THEE.”

 

Yes, sadly, foreign ministers and presidents the world over are collectively shaking their scented ruffles at the insane Burmese generals – or are forming a committee to discuss considering doing so.

There has been a veritable chorus of condemning, regretting, dismay-expressing, ambassadorial calling-in, message-sending, and outrage-huffing, done with all the dramatic impact of the flourish of an embroidered hanky.

It is, of course, a white hanky. On a stick.

Australia’s Foreign Minister, Lord Fopplington-Smythe Stephen Smith, waved his hanky in the sternest possible tones.

Mr Smith said Australia would maintain sanctions against the military Junta.

“Australia will now consult closely with the international community, including the United Nations and Australia’s ASEAN partners, on the need to put even more pressure on the Burmese regime to move down the path of democracy,” he said.

“Australia maintains financial sanctions against the Burmese regime.

Do you understand how grateful you ought to be for the Burma-facing glowering of the Australian Government? Do you have any idea of the powerful effect these sanctions have already had?

No.

Neither do we.

The glowering and hanky-waving is all done at a safe distance and harmlessly enough that no boat is rocked, no blow actually landed. Only the perfume of our sophistication wafts gently up the nostrils of the madmen of Myanmar.

This pissweak, stylised footstamping by international dandies playing an archaic game by pre-Enlightenment rules makes us – and, we think, most people – sick to the stomach. It is a betrayal of who we are and of the values that make us Australian. It is a betrayal of our responsibilities as citizens of the world.

But wait!

The Government will now move to update these [sanctions] and keep them focused for maximum impact.”

Oh, gosh! Updated sanctions! Focused sanctions! He is going to purse his lips even more tightly as he blows air in their direction! What a difference this will surely make! What do you get when you multiply an impact of ‘0’ by 100? That boy in the back? Fopplington-Smythe? That’s correct! ‘0’!

All of this pompadoured, powdered, pantalooned, silk-stockinged posturing has had exactly no effect whatever. More of the same will gain even more of the same: nothing. The Burmese generals always do what they always intended with impunity because they know that all the reaction they ever get is a waft of poudre kicked up by the phony outrage of a softly stamping, buckled shoe.

Khamenei Swore and I Congaed

Aug 3, 2009 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Religious Values, Values

Khamenei Swore and I Congaed

  

Ayatollah Khamenei declared the result of the Iranian election today:

“ The Iranian people have voted in favour of a fight against arrogance,” screamed the criminally-insane Ayatollah arrogantly, “and to confront destitution and spread justice,” the hate-filled theocrat sneered. “And that is why I am overturning the vote and declaring the election of the truly awful apostate, Ahmedinajad, void,” scowled the religious sociopath.

We can dream, can’t we?

 

 

Goldman Sachs: Bloodsucking Vampire Aliens?

Jul 15, 2009 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values

Goldman Sachs: Bloodsucking Vampire Aliens?

Goldman Sachs – covering the face of humanity?

 

Goldman Sachs is furious at what Matt Taibbi has written in Rolling Stone. This is apparently not absolutely fresh news but we heard the magic phrase for the first time this morning.

It’s from Taibbi’s article, “The Great American Bubble Machine”, in Rolling Stone about the place of Goldman Sachs in the modern world.

The memorable line is this description of Goldman Sachs:

“ The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

But then there is this, too:

“ Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

[ … ]

The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.

Taibbi also claims that Goldman is at the root of the astronomical oil price rises over the last year or so because oil has been commodified in the Goldman Sachs way so that every barrel of oil was bought and sold 27 times before it ever reached its end user. That’s 27 times a profit has to be made – sort of like compound interest, and your economics teacher told you how good that is at increasing your bank balance.

You might think, as Goldman Sachs has suggested, that his article is “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories” and so it might be — unless it is true. Taibbi certainly has filled his piece with checkable facts and figures, such as the astonishing reach of the company and its alumni, including: bailout czar, Paulson; Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and then chairman of Citigroup; John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch; Robert Steel, head of Wachovia, who “scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing”; Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout; Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff; and Ed Liddy, whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG. Etcetera etcetera etcetera…

Not to forget, as it seems Taibbi does, that Malcolm Turnbull is also an alumnus of Goldman Sachs: chair and managing director of Goldman Sachs Australia (1997-2001) and a partner with Goldman Sachs and Co (1998-2001). All we need is another ex-Goldman Sachs partner to become PM of Australia …

Read the full Rolling Stone article

Stark reading, and enough material to keep him writing for 7 (online) pages, including this potentially even more worrying note:

“ They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

According to this, if you want to rule the world, join Goldman Sachs!