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.

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!

 

Costello and Iran

Jun 17, 2009 | Australian Values, Capital Punishment, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values, War

Costello and Iran

Peter Costello reaching out to his future subjects

Our loyal visitors,

 

Wanting to know how to react to Peter Costello’s decision to disappear up his own arse at long last, may have been waiting with bated breath to hear Sir Roger’s wisdom on the issue.

 Sir Roger’s view?

Who gives a fuck?



I’m at dinner,  Jan!

On the building Iran crisis Values Australia modifies what it said two weeks ago about China and 6/4:

“ [/dropcapif you have to force the people … to obey the dictates of your Glorious Religion, if you have to kill people to force them to agree with you, then you are doing something very wrong, your basic religious premises are seriously fucked and your religion is after all not nearly so glorious as you might want to believe, however desperately.

The same goes for any religion.

Here is what is probably as close as anyone has come to our view of politics, democracy and religion, and from a Christian, no less: C. S. Lewis 

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments.

 

If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

 

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated.

– Of Other Worlds, 

  

Keelty

May 10, 2009 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

Keelty

 

Gone at long last

 

How much time should one spend on this slug?
We don’t even feel like woo-hoo. Just “at last” and “good riddance” and “what took you so long”.

One of the things we really dislike about (not exclusively-) Australian culture is the way we rail against awful people and the moment they die or resign we politely say ever such nice things about them. It’s hypocritical and weak and cowardly. We think. We have no such qualms. Keelty in our view was a bad man, morally weak, a disastrous Commissioner who willingly ran over the basics of human rights and legal traditions like habeas corpus in order to pursue a flawed and misguided agenda.

He was a willing and irretrievably politicised Liberal Party stooge, and concerned more with appearance than with the truth.


His most egregious failures are well-known – the obscene treatment of young Australians in the Bali Nine affair, Haneef, the onanistic display of muscle at APEC, and the Ul-Haque farce.

Speaking of Ul-Haque we once asked,

“ Justice Adams said ASIO officers ‘committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping.’ When do they go to prison? Have they been arrested and charged yet? Where are they being detained? Are they being pursued and prosecuted by the AFP with the same vigour and determination that it showed against…oh, I don’t know…Mohamed Haneef, say?”

Good question still.

Elsewhere we said:

“ It’s time for Mick Keelty to resign. Or be sacked. Keelty has to go because of how he thinks about the law. He has to go because everything points to his being utterly politicised and his making decisions on political, not legal, grounds as directed by his [then] masters, the Howard ministry. Keelty made, cleverly he probably thought, a Faustian pact with the Devil of Realpolitik. Now he’s been caught out yet again and so we say, yet again:

Do the decent thing at long last, Mick.

And we said this:

“ Sack [him] for misfeasance. Malfeasance. Non-feasance. Abuse of power by a public official. Criminal stupidity. Any of those will do.
Federal Police yesterday released a statement saying the former Gold Coast doctor [Haneef] is no longer a person of interest to them, and they have found there are no grounds to proceed against him. [SBS News]

Well fuck me dead – I’m Foreskin Fred! Yes, after all this time. After all the waste. After all the harm. After all the stupidity and incompetence. After Scotland Yard laughed at the AFP; months after the Queensland Police Service and ASIO both said there were no grounds. After all the subversion of democracy, the courts and the rule of law.

Sack them.

Everything about the carriage of the Haneef affair by the AFP and the government suggests that it never was about public safety; that it always was a political stunt; that it was in fact a considered and calculated decision by the AFP to use the Haneef matter for political ends. As we know from another case, the AFP sought every possible opportunity to test the envelope of the terrorism laws. Keelty, in particular, clearly operates a political agenda, having capitulated under pressure from John Howard years ago. He learned his lesson well and in the Haneef case hung his hat on the re-election of the Howard government. This means that he has lost sight of his actual role, his constitutional – and certainly his moral – obligation to the people of Australia and the democracy they own.

Nothing has happened to cause us to resile from these opinions. Keelty appalls us because he respects neither democracy nor the rule of law, the law being not a tool for repression and control but a safeguard of a vibrant civil society.

Keelty cheerfully acquiesced in the subversion of such safeguards.

  

Dawkins For Tony Blair

Apr 21, 2009 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Humour, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values

Dawkins For Tony Blair

Richard Loves Tony

  Richard Dawkins, in the New Statesman finds himself supporting war criminal Tony Blair who had recently written of his hopes and plans for the eponymous foundation based on his evidence-free beliefs.
“ Dear Person of Faith   Admittedly, there are one or two problems remaining to be ironed out there, but all the more reason for people of different faiths — Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shia — to join together in meaningful dialogue to seek common ground, just as Catholics and Protestants have done, so heart-warmingly, throughout European history. It is these great benefits of faith that the Tony Blair Foundation seeks to promote. “We are focusing on five main projects initially, working with partners in the six main faiths” Yes I know, I know, it’s a pity we had to limit ourselves to six. But we do have boundless respect for other faiths, all of which, in their colourful variety, enrich human lives. In a very real sense, we have much to learn from Zoroastrianism and Jainism. And from Mormonism, though Cherie says we need to go easy on the polygamy and the sacred underpants!! Then again, we mustn’t forget the ancient and rich Olympian and Norse traditions — although our modern blue-skies thinking out of the box has pushed the envelope on shock-and-awe tactics, and put Zeus’s thunderbolts and Thor’s hammer in the shade!!! We hope, in Phase 2 of our Five-Year Plan, to embrace Scientology and Druidic Mistletoe Worship, which, in a very real sense, have something to teach us all. In Phase 3, our firm commitment to Diversity will lead us to source new networking partnership opportunities with the many hundreds of African tribal religions. Sacrificing goats may present problems with the RSPCA, but we hope to persuade them to adjust their priorities to take proper account of religious sensibilities. [ … ] “We are working with the Coexist Foundation and Cambridge University to develop the concept of Abraham House” I always think it’s so important to coexist, don’t you agree, with our brothers and sisters of the other Abrahamic faiths. Of course we have our differences — I mean, who doesn’t, basically? But we must all learn mutual respect. For example, we need to understand and sympathise with the deep hurt and offence that a man can feel if we insult his traditional beliefs by trying to stop him beating his wife, or setting fire to his daughter or cutting off her clitoris (and please don’t let’s hear any racist or Islamophobic objections to these important expressions of faith). We shall support the introduction of sharia courts, but on a strictly voluntary basis — only for those whose husbands and fathers freely choose it. [ … ] With so many of the world’s problems caused by religion, what better solution could there possibly be than to promote yet more of it?  

 

Also in the New Statesman, A C Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, says the word “god” …
… brings to mind the man-made phenomenon of religions, whose net effect on humanity now as throughout history has been, by a considerable margin, negative. It would be so just because of the falsity of belief; and the consequent absurdity of behaviour premised on the idea that there exist supernatural agencies who made this very imperfect world, and who have an interest in us that extends to our sex lives and what we should and should not eat on certain days, or wear, and so on. But it is worse than false: it is far too often oppressive and distorting as regards human nature, and divisive as regards human communities. It is a frequent source of conflict and cruelty. Monstrous crimes have been committed in its name. And more often than not it has stood in the way of efforts at human liberation and progress. [ … ] I would wish people to live without superstition, to govern their lives with reason, and to conduct their relationships on reflective principles about what we owe one another as fellow voyagers through the human predicament ““ with kindness and generosity wherever possible, and justice always. None of this requires religion or the empty name of “god”. Indeed, once this detritus of our ignorant past has been cleared away, we might see more clearly the nature of good, and pursue it aright at last.
We, for one (or is that two? Now I’m we’re confused…) wholeheartedly endorse this last paragraph. (Except for the pompous “aright”…)   Both articles are worth reading in full at the links above.

Sacrifice?

Mar 17, 2009 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values, War

Sacrifice?

Can we just say to all the politicians who pompously intone the word “sacrifice” over the freshly dead bodies of Australian soldiers:

 

BULLSHIT!
WEASEL!
UNSPEAK!

 

Rudd

“ His sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

Turnbull:

“ All Australians are indebted for this, the greatest of sacrifices in our name.”

Let’s be really clear.

They didn’t “SACRIFICE”.

Sacrifice requires an intention. Death wasn’t their intention. Their intention was to stay alive.

To sacrifice is, roughly literally, to perform a sacred rite.

There was nothing ritual about the Australian soldier being killed in Afghanistan yesterday. Nor was there anything ‘sacred’.

Soldiers don’t “sacrifice”.

They get killed,

blasted,

blown to pieces,

in an obscenity we call war.

Blood splatters everywhere.

Pieces of shattered bone, skull, leg, liver, brain fly around.

Soldiers scream and groan in agony before they lose consciousness and leave their families without a husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, or friend.

To glorify and sanitise this as “sacrifice” is a willful, disingenuous and deliberate misrepresentation of the truth and an abomination in the language.

It is an attempt to make death in war acceptable or even good, somehow holy and blessed instead of admitting the horror, the awful, the dreadful, truth that people who have actually been there almost invariably describe — if they have words they can even bring themselves to speak.

Instead of being honest, the politicians go on to stitch the poor dead soldier onto the false myths of the faded, fraying, Anzac fabric.

“ He was a fine and courageous soldier in the great Anzac tradition,” Mr Rudd said.

And when they show images on television, they show PR footage of the Aussies dashing around with their rifles and hi-tech helmets being macho.

They never show pictures of their guts being sprayed everywhere.

Then there is the other nonsense.

At a time like this thoughts, prayers, condolences and sympathies are thick in the air like a flock of pigeons on crystal meth.

Rudd:

“ On behalf of the Australian government I extend my condolences to the family of this soldier, his friends and to his loved ones.” The thoughts and prayers of the entire nation were with the soldier’s family at this most difficult time, he said. “I would like to convey my deepest sympathy to his loved ones,” he said.

Mr Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull have extended sympathies to the soldier’s family.

Turnbull:

“ The thoughts and prayers of all Australians are with the soldier’s family.”

Air Chief Marshal Houston:

“ On behalf of our nation and the Australian Defence Force, I convey our deepest sympathies to his loved one.”

Our question is:

when the PM sends, conveys, or “extends” his thoughts, prayers, sympathies and condolences to us, how exactly do they get here?

How can we tell they have arrived?

What do they look like?

Should we keep the wrapping paper?

How big are they – will they all fit in my sock drawer?

If they are “deepest” sympathies, do I need a bigger drawer?

When someone’s “heart goes out” to us, do we have to have a special jar to keep it in?

What actually are these things?

What do they mean?

What actual value are they to us?

How much did they cost?

The answer to the last four questions are:

nothing,

nothing,

fuckall

fucking nothing.

Talk is cheap and mealy-mouthed words and pompous forms of words are empty and meaningless.

So, for a politician, the price is right.

They serve the speaker, not the supposed recipient who gets precisely nothing in fact. But at least the PM looks and sounds good and solemn and, who knows, might be a slightly better chance for re-election one day.

And by the way, how can Houston speak on behalf of “Our Nation”? The answer is, he can’t. The nation is not defined by the military. Neither his authority nor his remit extend beyond the military. He is unelected and cannot speak for anyone except his constituency, much as he might feel moved to by the occasion.

 

 

SECOND THOUGHTS

This cynical, political treatment of real human sadness is, we think, an example of what we like to call “Flashcard Politics”. The masters of this technique are Obama’s media team (greek columns, Lincoln monument, cheap emotional triggers etc. covering up the same old same old).

Rudd and his writers do it without shame