The Shamed Office of the Prime Minister of Australia

Let me be very clear:


It is not that Julia Gillard is attacked as Prime Minister because she is a Woman...the fact is that the Gillard Government is the worst Government Australia has ever manufactured and this fact is mostly the Prime Minister's direct fault.
It is not that somehow immediately 'bad forces' intrinsically undermine the current Prime Minister's Office, but rather that Gillard has destroyed any decent person's respect for this, up til now, reasonably decent and usually respected role.

Australia

The thing I find most disappointing about the Labor Government, having had so many great and never to be repeated opportunities for empowered Independence, Power and Significance for the benefit of Australians over the term of their government for 30 years into the future, have refused, at every opportunity, to do so...and have, consistently, in policy and preference, done the opposite. As if Gillard, Swan, Wong, Shorten, Garratt etc see Australians all as weak minded folk who just want to retire and die, UNABLE TO FACE A DECENT FUTURE FOR THEIR OWN CHILDREN, AS IF THIS DETRACTS Somehow FROM THEIR OWN MEANING!!!!
In this way, the Australian Labor Party is fully responsible and is the worst government Australia has ever had. Ever. It is not only the most anti-Labor government Australia has ever had, it is also the most Anti-historical government...so happy with the misery of the past...so happy to bring more misery to us. So happy with total dependence. So unhappy with intelligence, so unhappy with Human Reason.

Australia: The Future

I would expect that Tony Abbott will win the next 2 Federal elections very easily and then half way through the second term, Malcolm Turnbull will take over as Prime Minister and lead Australia into being a decent Australia Republic...something that the Australian Labor Party, under Gillard, has discounted totally as being 'far too hard' for Labor to do, ever.
By that time the Opposition Labor Party will compose of Bill Shjorten as Opposition leader and Penny Wong as Deputy...but neither of them really get the importance of the ideology they have betrayed...so the Labor Party, in exile, will be in exile for a long, long time...not because of the weakness of intelligence of its leaders, but because of the weakness in them, in terms of real quality, as people.

the Australian Flag

As an Australian, I think Australia is an okay place to live. I have lived in other countries, under other systems, some democratic, some Royalist, some communist-totalitarian, but all in all, Australia is okay.

It is nice and yet nothing really special.

The best thing about Australia is also the worse thing: the lack of people here. I have lived in a city bigger than the Australian national population...and there are many things nice about Australians in terms of being an endangered species in terms of numbers, but there are also some equally quite sad and lonely things about this reality...but that is a discussion for some other time.

I believe I was Lucky to be born as an Australian but this never translates into me being Proud to be born as an Australian...because birth/race and location is really much of a lottery.

I like Australia, after 60 years, but it has taken this long. You will not see me hanging the bizarre Australian flag from my doorstep...although there is nothing essentially wrong with the Australian Flag, apart from the British Flag so dominant in the sinister upper corner.

I will not be hanging this flag from my house, ever. It is a flag of Oppression, of ownership by someone else, and remains so, and will remain so until the British double-cross is removed.

The stars of the southern cross against the beautiful blue sky is a much better and more fitting and more beautiful flag for us as a people. We do not need a boomerang in it... the southern cross is our flag...without British and without Boomerang etc simply because when we look into the evening clear sky we see these stars...we do not need to see the British or the Boomerangs...every human being who has ever lived and belonged here for 100,000 years has always looked up to the Southern Cross to estimate their place of being...that is enough for me, and it is enough for all decent Australians to know where they are and who they are.

Analysing the ALP's vote come September/ Respecting my country is important to me.

It is pretty clear that with Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Bill Shorten at the helm, the ALP will be demolished as a political entity in September...for a minimum of 20 years.
With Kevin Rudd and a new team at the helm, the ALP will be demolished for maybe 10 years.
You can see why Bill Shorten is being so ambivalent right now...
His chances for himself as a 'statesman' will increase if both Julia and Kevin fail completely....so he is in a hard place, but a hard place he created for himself and indeed, for us.
The problem with being a Great Manipulator, as Bill Shorten most certainly is, is that he is also a very flawed human being, and this keeps showing through in public.
We are all flawed human beings, but NOT THAT flawed as is young small Bill. It's true.

None of the current ALP ministers show any real abiding strategic political intelligence or ideology at all.
This is what the ALP actually is now...short term profit entrepreneurs using 'the Faithful' for their own purposes to continue to wear nice suits and jackets and get paid for pronouncements that look kind of okay but aren't backed up at all by real human work or real human initiative... or even real political normalcy. The Australian Labor Party is a Party bereft of Human Reason.
It isn't going to work.
They've had the massive opportunities, opportunities no one in Australian politics has ever had before, ever, the opportunities to enshrine and ensure a decent well-off Australia that persists well into the future for many decades, and, at every opportunity they've stuffed up every single one of those opportunities based upon really silly and very conservative and almost antediluvian ideas.
We were already behind the 'eight ball' of the Asian Century at the start, because of John Howard, but we have jumped so far back now into the 1950s of Australia that it is really breathtaking, as a failure to thrive. Australia a Nation that chooses to fail to thrive under Gillard. A nation that chooses the darkness. Chooses the small ambitions of its leaders, full of hate for each other, over what is actually fair and decent and a good future for all Australians.

No. No more of this rubbish.

Because of Julia and Wayne and Bill and Penny and Peter we are now at least 20 years behind 'the Asian Century' for the intrinsically important decisions that had to be made...& that opportunity won't come again...and they did all that in 3 years...
No.
No.
The ALP? No. No Way.
Respecting my country is important to me.

regarding the Australian Labor Party and the September Election day

Apart from a few times when I've voted for the Greens, I've always voted for the Australian Labor Party, since I was 19 years old.

When I was 18 years old I voted for the Australian Liberal Party and I regretted that for half a lifetime really. I'm 59 now.

Come September, I will be voting for the Liberal Party again for 2 serious reasons:

1: The Australian Labor Party is a party and a government of Farce and Self-Hatred with seriously career-minded ALP folk are jostling for power rather than having a vision for the future, and hating each other much more than they hate the opposition ideology. Policies are determined on the basis of 'what might people support today? So, let us do whatever that is.' without thought of the cost or consequence of the actions, spread out over the years ahead. The ALP's vision for Disability Insurance and for Education are prime examples of this...sure, they are both good ideas but the cost and implications and consequences have not been analysed at all. Most people would support these ideas, as most people would support 'Motherhood' as a good idea...
The cost to Australia of the Gillard Government's dumping of the Rudd plan to tax mining companies 'something' has meant that the highest earners have not paid tax...during a rich period for them. How this can be seen as good social policy is really beyond me.

The Carbon Tax purpose was, apparently, to reduce pollution and raise money for sustainable innovation tied to the Euro carbon price...but the reality is that the Euro price has fallen to about nothing, so nothing much is coming in for innovation except the money...a tax on us, that will be used to pay the usual bills of a government that has run out of money due to very poor decisions during the longest richest times we have known as a country.

Australia avoided the first hurt of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis not because of Government being smart but because we sold heaps of minerals to China. Then we set up a US Marine base in Darwin to use military force against China in the future, and instantly our sales to China went down and will continue to go down, understandably. This was such a stupid decision. Short-sighted, based on racism and on just always doing what the USA does, and we have suffered for this a lot already and will continue to. The GFC of 2008 hasn't even half finished yet...that the Australian Labor Government had no idea of this, well, this just shows the appalling decisions of the ALP still continue.

2: The other reason I will be voting for the Liberal Party is that the local member can be easily contacted and will reply to concerns and enquiries from me, as a citizen. I have asked the ALP for advice, help, intervention etc and have never ever received any reply and I would guess that this is because I don't represent a Trade Union or an important Mining Company...I am just a person who every now and then seeks some assistance. The local federal Liberal Party member has always replied very fast and 70% of the time has helped me a lot, and at other times has made sure I know why he disagrees with me...and I can at least respect that.

obama and the real crime of edward snowden

Obama's crackpot realism and the real crime of Edward Snowden

C Wright Mill's concept of 'crackpot realism' helps explain and define Obama's continuity with George Bush's policies. Last Modified: 16 Jun 2013 18:12

Paul Rosenberg Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newspaper. RSS Random Lengths News

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The NSA was targeted by an Anonymous 'trolling' operation in the days after Snowden's revelations [Reuters]

On June 8, Juan Cole, one of the few true Middle East experts in the US, posted a short entry on his Informed Comment blog. The title said it all: "We misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the domestic surveillance to be made legal, not to end it". But domestic surveillance was far from the only Bush policy that Obama has wanted to continue, despite giving supporters the opposite impression. The continued - if reduced - use of indefinite detention is one example, the continued - vastly expanded - use of drones is another, and underlying them all is the continued self-defeating policy of fighting a global "war on terrorism" - but debranding it, because the term "war on terror" has become toxic, and renaming it makes it harder to oppose. Foreign policy is not the only area in which Obama has turned out to be far more conservative than his 2008 campaign supporters had reason to believe, and there's surely a variety of different factors involved. But in the overlapping realms of foreign policy and national security highlighted by the revelations of Edward Snowden, one factor in particular deserves our attention: what the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills described over half a century ago as "crackpot realism". In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Mills wrote: "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own." Taking for granted that paranoid reality then, of course the calculus shifts entirely to preventing any successful attack, however small, because of where it might lead - and doing so, effectively, forever.  Such is the framework within which the liberal John F Kennedy said we would "bear any burden, pay any price" - but certainly not ask about the burden and the price of the crackpot realist mindset itself.  And that is the unaskable question that anti-war activists posed in the 1960s, that Daniel Ellsberg posed when he released the Pentagon Papers, and that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden pose for us today. More of the same Mills was writing about Cold War America. But given how much actual military power the Soviet Union possessed, compared with how little al-Qaeda has, the crackpot realism Mills wrote about pales in comparison with that of today.  Although it was madness to believe that the Soviet Union would actually launch a nuclear war, thus ensuring its own destruction, there was at least a real military capability involved. Al-Qaeda, in contrast, wasn't even a military force when it pulled off the 9/11 attacks, touching off America's "war on terror" response - which was exactly what al Qaeda wanted, since going to war was the only way they could possibly become the "holy warriors" they imagined themselves to be. It was, quite frankly, America's military response to 9/11 that created al Qaeda as a military force and legitmised its bogus claim to the mantle of being called "holy warriors". Edward Snowden's crime is not that he revealed too much, but too little. Thus, the decision to respond to 9/11 as an act of war rather than a crime was arguably Washington's greatest foreign policy blunder ever. The straight-forward equivalent of trying to fight a fire with gasoline. And it need not have been. The whole world was horrified by the 9/11 attacks. Even Afghanistan's Taliban ruler, Mullah Omar, was unwilling to defend them, and was willing to turn bin Laden over to an Islamic court if presented with evidence of al-Qaeda's responsibility. Of course that was an "unthinkable" course of action for America's military-industrial elite at the time. But, as I've discussed here before, the people of the United States - even in the face of tremendous one-sided propaganda (one study found that op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post ran 44-2 in favour of war during the first three weeks after September 11) - were remarkably more open-minded. A week after 9/11, a Gallup poll found that, while 54 percent of US respondents favoured a military response, 30 percent favoured a criminal justice response and 16 percent were undecided. Gallup international asked the same question of people in 34 other countries, with landslide majorities 2-, 3- even 4-1 in favour of a criminal justice response in almost every one of them.  But the exceptions, favouring a military reaction, proved just as instructive as the worldwide supermajorities for a criminal justice response. There were just two exceptions: India and Israel. Both have decades of history trying in vain to use military force to crush "Muslim extremists," who are almost entirely of their own making. Anyone with a lick of sense would ask India and Israel what to do about 9/11, and then pull a George Costanza, and do precisely the opposite. But the US did not have a lick of sense. Not in 2001, and not under George W Bush. As a result, and as one of Juan Cole's guest bloggers, Chase Madar, recently pointed out: "The government endangered us with foreign quagmires; it's the Bradley Mannings that might keep us safe," US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are now double the number killed in 9/11, the number of seriously wounded US military personnel is at least 50,000. "And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and foreign coalition personnel killed in both wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more." False promises By 2008, things had changed. In fact, there was hope and change... or at least so people hoped. But as Juan Cole pointed out, Obama's supporters were mostly mistaken about the largely cosmetic nature of the change he was offering.  More broadly than just on the matter of domestic spying, Obama took the position of opposing "dumb wars" - a stance that enabled him to win the Democratic nomination, since he hadn't been in DC in 2002, when all the other Democratic hopefuls were giving Bush a blank cheque to invade Iraq. But when you really think about it, who isn't opposed to dumb wars? The question really is: how, in general, do you go about telling dumb wars from wise ones... if, indeed there are any wise ones. Opposing dumb wars should be the starting point of an intelligent debate, not the end point. But that's what it was in Obama's election campaign, which is, according to Mills, just another symptom of a system infected with crackpot realism.  US to prosecute NSA leaker Snowden Bush's war making had been so spectacularly dumb that no-one really forced the issue and made Obama explain what he meant in terms of guiding principles which could let us understand what he intended to do in future situations. He did contrast Afghanistan with Iraq, and say that he would shift forces to fight there. But many observers felt that was simply electioneering, posturing to be safe. Once he got into office, and heard how hopeless the Afghanistan situation was, they assumed, he'd quietly change his tune and not expand the war there - as, indeed, Vice President Biden apparently advised him to do. After all, they don't call Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires" for nothing. Perhaps if Obama had been pressed to explain himself beforehand, to explain the difference between dumb wars and smart ones, then people might have known what to expect. Perhaps, Obama might even have been forced to take a genuinely sane position, instead of a crackpot realist one. Let us recall the historical background for Obama's argument, the historical background of America's two prototypical "good wars": the Civil War and World War II. Both were fought for good moral reasons - even, one could argue, out of profound moral necessity. And yet both were fought because the seeds of that moral necessity were sown long in advance, when more just policies could have prevented them both. And both resulted in such horrors that even the victors were shamed.  How "good" could such wars be, even if the evils they were fought against were as monstrous as anything in human history? This is the sort of question that Americans have never, as a nation, grappled with in the post 9/11 era. And yet, it's a question that defines us as a nation, not by the answer we give, but by the refusal to answer it, the refusal to even attempt an answer, the refusal to engage and struggle with it. And crackpot realism is our agreed-upon means of evasion, the foundation of our national consensus in the one area where conservatives are actually willing to let Obama have his consensus. That alone should tell us how rotten the consensus is. And that is the unquestioned foundation, the backdrop for everything that is being argued over in the realms of secret surveillance and secret war fighting today. As long as we do not confront the foundations of crackpot realism in our national thinking, all our discussions will veer off course, hitting the wrong targets, spreading the very chaos and confusion that we vainly hope to contain. I'd like to offer one more quote from C Wright Mills, which also seems completely contemporary almost 60 years later: "America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivialising campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America." Against this backdrop, Edward Snowden's crime is not that he revealed too much, but too little. The rest is up to all of us. Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer, senior editor for Random Lengths News, where he's worked since 2002. He's also written for Publishers Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, LA Times, LA Weekly and Denver Post. In 2000/2001, he was a principal editor/writer at Indymedia LA. He was a front-page blogger at Open Left from 2007 to 2011.