Politics
Accepting reality: the future will not be made in Australia
With a couple of minutes Googling, your favourite Martian could be well informed on the role of government in the Australian economy from the moment of the arrival of the British colonialists. It’s been big. Colonial and other governments have not only provided legal and economic frameworks within which private organisations can work, they’ve done Continue reading »
Vast inequality threatens democracy
The disparity is vast and immoral. Emotional language touches souls, but in Indonesia it should also grab economics and politics. The new government could demand reform. It wont. We’ll call her Siti. Real name usage might threaten the uni graduate’s fragile job as an English teacher at a government school. She earns less than Rp Continue reading »
Australia’s love affair with imprisonment
The latest statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics paint a grim picture of a nation becoming more and more entangled in the web of incarceration. During 2022-23, the total number of people behind bars surged by three percent, accompanied by a one percent rise in the imprisonment rate. These figures not only reflect a Continue reading »
Who will win the US Presidential Election? Professor Lichtman may hold the key
The Guardian newspaper reports that history professor Allan Lichtman is known as the Nostradamus of US presidential elections since he has correctly predicted the results of nine of the past ten ballots. And even the one he missed in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore because thousands of black votes got rejected on a Continue reading »
When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/7a654a7ff825490f5b1a363ba4d83c9d/href
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Politico reports that the DNC is planning to move the Chicago convention partially online in order to “tamp down demonstrators” against Biden’s genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party’s apathy toward this election is almost as blatant as its support for police crackdowns on political dissent.
When nobody in power will lift a finger to earn your vote but they’re falling all over themselves trying to stomp out a robust protest movement, that tells you what the powerful are actually afraid of and where you should really be focusing your political energy.
Your votes don’t matter, but your activism does. These freaks are terrified that one day the people will stop playing with the toy steering wheel of voting that they were given to divert their political energy and use the power of their numbers to grab the real steering wheel.
POLITICO on Twitter: "Joe Biden's top advisors are worried the Democratic convention could erupt in protests - so they're pushing to move it semi-online https://t.co/QIyKl7MzIV / Twitter"
Joe Biden's top advisors are worried the Democratic convention could erupt in protests - so they're pushing to move it semi-online https://t.co/QIyKl7MzIV
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If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish.
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Israel supporters pretend to believe pro-Palestine protesters have a genocidal hatred of Jews when their real crime is that they don’t share Israel’s genocidal hatred of Palestinians.
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The difference between liberals and rightists on middle east policy is that rightists openly believe middle easterners are apelike savages who should be beaten into submission or eliminated, whereas liberals believe exactly the same thing but have the decency to lie about it.
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The way to see past the distortions of the imperial propaganda matrix is to learn to distinguish between empty narrative fluff and the raw data of where weapons, money and resources are moving to. Antiwar.com is probably the best resource at documenting the day-to-day raw data of these movements. I also keep a public Twitter list with a bunch of journalists, commentators and public figures who provide information about the daily movements of the imperial machine.
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It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.
You grow up learning that if a man puts his hands on a woman she needs to get the hell out of there, but you can live your entire adult life in a relationship where your partner twists your mind into knots to bend you to his will without recognizing what’s happening. In exactly the same way, we grow up learning about Evil Dictatorships in other countries where dissent is banned and the government controls the populace with an iron fist, but we can go our entire lives without recognizing that we are ruled by powerful people who use mass-scale psychological manipulation to exert an even greater degree of control over us.
The truth is we live in a highly abusive mind-controlled dystopia where people’s thoughts, words and actions are largely predetermined by an information system controlled by powerful plutocrats and empire managers, and the genius of it is that it controls us to a greater degree than overt tyranny ever could while at the same time giving us the collective delusion that we are free.
We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from. The news media are controlled by wealthy oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised. Silicon Valley tech plutocrats quickly learn that living the high life is a lot easier for them if they collaborate with US government agencies and help protect the information interests of the US-centralized empire. Wealthy elites control mainstream culture by restricting which people and what ideas are given a platform in the culture-manufacturing centers of New York and Los Angeles.
We grow up thinking we are free, but in a very real sense people are less free in our society than they are under a proper dictatorship: under a standard dictatorship people’s minds are freer, because people know they are not free. In our society people think, speak, vote, shop, work and behave exactly how the powerful want them to, mindlessly regurgitating political opinions that were inserted into their brains by their rulers and sincerely believing they came up with it themselves.
A quote from Chomsky:
“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”
Another quote from Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Another:
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Limited liability companies cause moral hazard
I posted this video on YouTube this morning:
The link is here.
The transcript is as follows:
Limited liability companies are a threat to your well-being. Now most people don't think like that, but I do.
We all think we're familiar with what a limited liability company is. It's just an organisation, set up by one or more people, and it has Ltd after its name, which stands for Limited Company. That means that the shareholders do not have to pay the debts of the company if that company goes bust owing you money, the shareholders, being the people who set the company up and bought shares in it and who have the right to manage it by appointing its directors.
Larger limited companies are called PLCs, or public limited companies, and we're very familiar with them. Most of the things you buy on the High Street will be sold to you by a PLC. Most certainly, your shopping, in the sense of your food and everything else, will be, and your banks are PLCs as well.
So why are those companies a threat to your well-being? Well, they create the risk of something called moral hazard. Moral hazard is the behaviour of a person who undertakes an activity knowing that they won't have to bear all the consequences of their actions.
Sometimes moral hazard is created by things like insurance. In other words, we'll be a bit reckless because we think, well, we've insured against the loss of this particular thing happening. Bashing the car, maybe. Or losing something, so we're risky with regard to where we leave it.
But moral hazard can also be created by limited companies because if the shareholders of a company realise that they do not have to pay its creditors if the company goes bust, they may take more risks than is appropriate.
They'll be reckless because they are not responsible for the money that they are managing, which fundamentally is other people's money.
Let me give you an example. In 2007, the Northern Rock Building Society, by then actually a bank, went bust because its directors had been irresponsible. There's no way around that observation. They had lent people who had applied for mortgages 125 per cent of the value of the properties against which they were lending for the purposes of security. In other words, if you wanted to buy a house which was going to cost £200,000, the Northern Rock Building Society offered you £250,000 in mortgage. It was reckless because they were using other people's money. And that building society ran out of road. It could not pay its creditors. The government had to bail it out.
That was an example of moral hazard. It created the first run on a bank in the UK in a 160 years. But it happens day in day out amongst smaller and sometimes even larger companies. Carillion was a very large trading company, a builder, which went bust because it basically was reckless with regard to its creditor’s money.
Smaller companies do this. We know that there are fly-by-night companies who are set up, never have any intention of really paying people, trade for a little while, the owners take the cash and then run, and the money which is owing to the suppliers disappears. This is moral hazard and that's why we need to regulate companies well in this country.
We don't regulate companies well. We let people have companies by paying just £12 online to form one. We don't require proof of identities. We don't require that they file their accounts if they disappear fairly quickly. We don't know anything about them. And all of that is an environment that creates risk.
I don't know why we put up with that. Limited companies should be much better regulated than they are because otherwise they impose a cost on you, me and everyone else in the country, because some people, let's be blunt, can't be trusted and give them the opportunity to exploit somebody else and they accept the moral hazard that they are being faced with.
They take the risks, they leave somebody else to bear the consequences, and that is unacceptable.
Bettina Arndt And You Just Don’t Know How Hard It Is To Be A Man!
Now when I say that it’s very difficult to write about certain topics because I’m a white male, it makes it sound like I don’t know how privileged I am… which, of course, is the point. I end up sounding like I’m mansplaining and that’s upsets just about everyone. Lots of men get upset because…
The post Bettina Arndt And You Just Don’t Know How Hard It Is To Be A Man! appeared first on The AIM Network.
Does self-interest necessarily rule – with inevitable destruction?
Before attempting an answer, first let us hold the mirror up to obvious signs of our dysfunction. The last few days have spotlighted electronic media, the billionaires who profit from it, and their business model which refuses accountability. Domestic violence has many causes but misogynist treatment of women as objects of male fantasy is standard Continue reading »
Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’
In this seemingly topsy-turvy world we live in, the charge of ‘antisemitism’ and its offshoot ‘antisemite’ have been hurled at anyone who dares suggest that there is something deeply flawed about the State of Israel. Likewise branded are those who have been protesting against Israel’s winner-takes-all retaliation for the Hamas October 7 massacre. Strange too, Continue reading »