Australia: Battle Lines are being further defined over the Carbon Tax

Whereas the past few years have seen carbon tax supporters making leering remarks to the anti-carbon tax advocates in a manner that tries to make the latter look like uneducated loonies, the lines are now clarifying.

Labor, as we know, is steadfastly pro-green (hung by a political noose Julia?), but many liberals have seemed to be in opposition to this. Barnaby Joyce is, I hope, a man of conviction regarding the lack of science behind the carbon-traders; only time will tell however if Barnaby holds true to his rhetoric. Some others are however starting to show their colours; Tony Abbott for one.

Malcolm Turnbull certainly showed his leaning at the Inaugural Virginia Chadwick Memorial Foundation Lecture in Sydney on July 21st 2011. He did his level best to discredit Lyndon LaRouche, and talks down his references and credentials. Can we believe Mr Turnbull in a speech made to a captive audience when Lyndon LaRouche, the only man who accurately forecast the GFC, has no right of reply? I think not!

Tony Abbott is a monarchist, as was I until I understood the fuller history of the British Empire and the lengths Prince Phillip (and Prince Charles) have gone to to promote their green fascist agenda to enslave the 'serfs' of the world.

Prince Philip and former Nazi SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands co‑founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 to reduce human population; the WWF has raised enormous sums of money from multinational corporations like BP‚ Shell‚ Rio Tinto‚ and Unilever to lock up great tracts of land, first in Africa, and then all over the world‚ so that the land could not be used by locals for the kind of economic development they required to raise their living standards.

Prince Philip fantasised aloud about population‑reduction in August 1988‚ telling Deutsche Presse‑Agentur‚ “In the event that I am reincarnated‚ I would like to return as a deadly virus‚ in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

Tony Abbott told ABC radio on 16^th December that his idea that there was a natural fit between the conservation movement and “conservative” politics was inspired by “no less a person than Prince Philip” being the “inaugural president or patron at one of the big international environmental organisations [sic].”

Tony Abbott's has recently embraced greenie policies more fully, including his plan to complete the Howard government‑initiated shut‑down of the Murray‑Darling Basin‚ and to draft 15‚000 Australians into a sub‑minimum wage “green” army. 

God help Australia. We really need to know what our politicians stand for, not just what they say in-situ, but what they really think and will act on!

Steve B

Hidden Agenda: The "Debt Crisis Plan" was to Strike a Blow at the National Social Safety Net

Oh, this article says it so well. The USA has been set up! We are experiencing a parallel thing in Australia, with the rich and powerful trying to cement their dominant position. Steve B ===== The debt crisis has been averted and people across the globe are breathing sighs of relief. But in the back rooms of the US Congress, politicians are celebrating for a different reason. It's the kind of celebration that erupts when a group executes a complicated plan to perfection. The objective in this case was to strike the first blows against the national social safety net without encountering massive resistance. Mission half-accomplished thus far.   Half accomplished because only half of the $2.5 billion in cuts have been decided on. The other half will be sent to a bi-partisan committee where, according to the White House Fact Sheet:  "... the committee will consider responsible entitlement [Social Security and Medicare] and tax reform [cuts to entitlement programs]. This means putting all the priorities of both parties on the table – including both entitlement reform [Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid] and revenue-raising tax reform.”   If the committee fails to agree on the cuts, they would be automatically triggered, and Medicare would be the target: "...any cuts to Medicare would be capped and limited to the provider side." This means that fewer doctors would accept Medicare patients or they would provide fewer services to Medicare beneficiaries.   When it comes to cutting Social Security and Medicare, the Democrats are Republicans are only trying to get their foot into the door. Nevertheless, the potential cuts will have a massive impact on the millions of Americans who depend on these vital services. And if these cuts are allowed to happen unopposed, the possibility of future, more dramatic cuts is certain.   Equally bad is that the budget deal makes the unemployment situation even worse. In writing about the effect the cuts would have on employment, a Moody’s analyst predicted that:  "The deal announced last night calls for a yearly average of $240 billion in cuts over the next decade. Very roughly, that suggests the new plan would cost around 1.6 million jobs per year during that time. [!]" (August 1st, 2011).  This noxious level of contempt for working people was the product of a manufactured crisis, with Democrats and Republicans playing along. How did Obama and the Democrats essentially push through the long-term objectives of the Republican Party? Author Michael Hudson explains on Democracy Now:   "... There has to be a crisis. Now, in reality, there is no crisis at all. In reality, raising the debt ceiling has been done for a hundred years automatically. There is no connection between raising the debt ceiling and arguing over tax policy. Tax policy takes many years to work out. All of a sudden, Mr. Obama is going along with the charade of saying, "Wait a minute, let’s create a crisis."... And Wall Street doesn’t like real crises, so there’s an artificial non-crisis that Obama is treating as a crisis so that he can put forth the recommendations of the Deficit Reduction Commission to get rid of Social Security that he has supported all along." (July 22nd, 2011).   Thus, it's not true that Obama was "held hostage" by the Republicans. If he told the country only half of what Mr. Hudson explained on Democracy Now, the Republicans would have folded instantly. If Obama would have told the country that the Republicans wanted massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare, instead of purposely hiding these issues, Republican voters would have converged on Capitol Hill with torches and pitchforks. Instead, Obama went along with the charade; because in order for it to succeed, he was required to play a leading role in the drama.   Liberal groups and the major labor federations -- AFL-CIO and Change to Win -- have given a left cover to Obama's far-right policies, wrongly blaming only the Republicans every step of the way. But this willful blindness has its limits. These groups intend to "get out the vote" for Obama in 2012 while ignoring all the damage he's done to working families, while they also ignore all the promises Obama made to them and didn't keep last time.   The rank-and-file members of labor unions and liberal groups are among the million of Americans suffering under Obama's economic policies and will not follow their leaders like lemmings over the cliff for Obama's next presidential run. There will be a profound lack of rank-and-file volunteers to campaign for Obama, even as labor union leaders throw away their members’ dues money for the campaign. And because fewer members will campaign for Obama, he will feel less inclined to reward them after (or if) he wins. Instead, he'll again reward Wall Street, meaning, he'll continue to take from working people and give to the rich, further exacerbating the problem.   To change this downward spiral for labor and liberal groups a new approach is desperately needed, and can be started in two steps: 1) Put forth independent demands. 2) Wage a real fight for these demands. The most immediate demands for the majority of people are job creation and saving Social Security, Medicare, and the broader safety net including Medicaid. These demands require that revenue be raised by taxing the rich and corporations, since no other group can afford any taxes, and inequality continues to skyrocket.   There is a direct link between the decades-long lowering of taxes on the wealthy and corporations and deficits rising on the national and state level. Economist Richard Wolff explains on Democracy Now:    "We’re running a deficit because the people who run this society would like us to deal with our economic problems, not by taxing those who have it, the way we used to, but instead by endlessly borrowing from them. And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt. And they want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation." (July 29th, 2011).   So instead of directly taxing the very rich and corporations, we are borrowing money from them with interest. Much of the money we are borrowing from them was given to them via the bank bailouts; they were given free taxpayer money and lent the money back to the taxpayers, while demanding that programs that benefit working people be slashed! This extraordinary moment requires extraordinary action from working class organizations, including mass demonstrations as part of a sustained, independent campaign.   The deficit reduction plan worked out by the cooperation between Republicans and Democrats is not set in stone.  Massive, ongoing protests have a tendency to make politicians re-think their policies. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/07/31/white-house-issues-fact-sheet-on-debt-deal/ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/debt-ceiling-deal-impact-economy-ordinary-americans-163456632.html http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/22/pushing_crisis_gop_cries_wolf_on http://www.truth-out.org/richard-wolff-debt-showdown-political-theater-burdening-societys-most-vulnerable-video/1311960605 Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)
Shamus Cooke is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Shamus Cooke
source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25862

The Mysterious Death of Osama bin Laden: Creating Evidence Where There Is None

More on the Bin Laden death being faked (probably by the CIA) for Obama's ends. What convenient timing this all was!!!

Steve B
=====

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
Aug 5, 2011

The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.
There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government’s crumbling 9/11 story?
The gullible Schmidle tells us: “‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him–it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me.” In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden, because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.
Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden’s body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world?
No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: “All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea–a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth.” But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, “Your plan sounds like a good one.”
I mean, really.
After all of Sy Hersh’s New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.

• 

In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden’s alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video. According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were 3 helicopters. Only 1 landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr. Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.
The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.
A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir’s interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0vo-L3VACs
Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.
If the English translation of Mr. Bashir’s interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.
Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs’ weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as “unarmed” and undefended. The “startled” bin Laden didn’t even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was “intense.”
When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second and third hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn’t someone qualified look into the story?
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.

Dow Bloodbath Could Herald “Great Depression”

NY Times admits: It’s a ‘double dip’ as markets plunge.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, August 5, 2011

Seven months after President Barack Obama gave a State of the Union speech in which he said the economy was in “recovery mode” and that “the stock market has come roaring back,” the New York Times today all but admits that America has entered a double dip recession following yesterday’s 512 point Dow plunge, while others go further, warning of a new Great Depression as markets continue to plummet today.
Why it takes a dramatic fall in the stock market for the establishment media to admit something that’s been painfully obvious in almost every other sector of the economy for the last 2 years goes right to the heart of the split between Wall Street and Main Street.
Rising unemployment, crumbling house prices, record food stamp usage, and the soaring price of gold as a barometer of dollar depreciation are three key reasons why contrarians have been warning all along that the economy was in fact getting worse and that talk of a “recovery” was deluded at best and crazy at worst.
For refusing to go along with the happy clappers by putting the blinkers on when it comes to the real measurements of economic health and not the phony, casino-style stock market, people like Gerald Celente and Max Keiser were accused of engaging in “pessimism porn” even as their forecasts played out.
Americans who believed the propaganda about the non-existent “recovery” and failed to move their assets into safe havens will feel stabbed in the back now that the Old Gray Lady finally admits the 2008 recession never really ended. But it really serves them right for placing trust in an establishment that has lost all credibility.
Under the headline, Time to Say It: Double Dip Recession May Be Happening, Floyd Norris highlights how the recession was significantly deeper than we were first told, and the so-called “recovery” was notably overestimated.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 
  

“Last week the government announced its annual revision to the numbers for the last several years. New government surveys indicated Americans had spent less than previously estimated in 2009 and 2010 on a wide range of things, including food, clothing and computers. Tax returns showed Americans even cut back on gambling. The recession now appears to have been deeper — a top-to-bottom fall of 5.1 percent — and the recovery even less impressive. The economy is still smaller than it was in 2007,” writes Norris.
Thursday’s market bloodbath also prompted John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Investors Service in New York, to predict a return to recession. “I now think the odds are uncomfortably high for a double dip,” he said.
But Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland business school and former chief economist for the U.S. International Trade Commission, went further, warning of a crisis to rival the fallout of 1929.
“If we go down a second time, it will be the Great Depression,” he said. “Last time (during the long recession) you didn’t see armies of men roaming the country looking for work. Next time the (extended) unemployment benefits will be tapped out, public employees will be laid off; we will see some really bad things.”
Yesterday’s stock market plunge, which is being repeated in Asian and European markets so far today, will precipitate what the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke were planning all along – QE3 – which could represent a terminal blow for the already stricken U.S. dollar. Helicopter Ben will flood the money supply with more fake greenbacks, the artificially inflated stock market will briefly rally once more, and all the suckers will plough all their money back in only to get burned again later down the line.
Smart and sober realists who doggedly stuck to the unspectacular but reliable safe havens of gold, silver and other stores of wealth, will once again preserve the value of their assets.
As Marc Faber told Bloomberg yesterday, ” “Stocks will be dropping 30%, then rallying 20%, and dropping another 30% – that’s going to be the pattern. And whoever can’t live with that shouldn’t be buying equities at all.”
Faber warns “there is a case to be ultrabearish about everything, and markets are going to go lower,” adding that next week will give us a clearer picture of exactly how much enthusiasm Bernanke has for hammering the final nail in the dollar’s coffin with the launch of QE3.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

"Colonial nature of Libya war now crystal clear" : Go Libya; Go For Freedom!

As the U.S./NATO war on Libya enters its fifth month, resistance to the intervention has intensified. The thousands of bombs dropped by Western governments on Libya have proved to be no deterrent to massive street demonstrations defending the Libyan government.
As of July 14, NATO air strikes have killed 1,110 civilians and wounded 4,500. The sanctions imposed on Libya by western powers have resulted in shortages of fuel, foodstuffs and water. On July 22, NATO bombed an essential pipeline that carries 70 percent of the population’s water supply. NATO announced July 30 that it had bombed three Libyan state TV satellite transmitters in Tripoli overnight.
The bombing of vital infrastructure, schools, warehouses and hospitals is routine. Far from weakening the government’s support, these attacks have served to galvanize the Libyan masses.
In Tripoli, nearly 2 million people, one-third of the Libyan population, took to the streets July 1 to oppose the NATO bombings in one of the largest rallies in world history. At the rally, protesters rolled out a huge 6 km-long (3.2-mile) Libyan flag.
The protests have been ongoing and have spread to cities and towns throughout the country. In al-Aziziyah, nearly every one of the town’s 4,000 residents came out July 19 to support the Libyan government. Pro-government protests have even taken place in Eastern Libya, including in the rebel-stronghold of Benghazi.

The Fed’s Big Secret: Money is Worthless (video)

Stefan Molyneux (video host) interviews Casey Research Chief Economist Bud Conrad on the current state of the U.S. and global economy, with a specific emphasis on the Federal Reserve and investment implications.

Green Australia: increase its carbon footprint!

An article from the CEC copied below. It's very interesting that many scientists are now starting to say carbon is good!

Steve B
=====

If Australia is to enhance the biosphere and green the dead areas of the planet for future generations, it is imperative that we pump much larger quantities of carbon dioxide—the gas of life and a vital plant food—into the atmosphere over the immediate years ahead. While Australia’s emissions will initially make little overall difference to global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration—being only 1.3 per cent of global anthropogenic emissions—over several decades and in concert with other nations, we can increase the total mass of life on earth. Working in our favour is the fact that this colourless, odourless gas will be an inevitable byproduct of the massive program of infrastructure development that we must undertake in the immediate future to rebuild from the current economic catastrophe.
After a generation of globalisation, our cities are stuck in traffic jams due to lack of transport infrastructure; we’ve experienced increasing water restrictions due to lack of water supply infrastructure; blackouts and brownouts occur at peak periods due to lack of electricity supply infrastructure, and the list goes on.
We need a massive rebuilding program and this will require lots of concrete, steel, aluminium and much more.
Cement, which is used in concrete as a binder, is made by heating limestone (calcium carbonate) in a kiln, in a process known as calcination. Carbon dioxide gas is liberated during calcination and kilns require lots of energy.
Iron, steel and aluminium production all require vast quantities of energy and until we establish a nuclear power industry, most of the power for metals production can only be efficiently generated from coal-fired power stations and other carbon-based fuels.
Many thousands of dump trucks, excavators, bulldozers, graders and other earthmoving equipment will be required to build dams, roads, railways, tunnels, bridges and whole new cities. Forget solar and wind power for an earthmover! They will be powered by diesel engines.
We won’t live in poverty and squalor as the greenies demand. We are going to rebuild our economy and provide a prosperous future for the coming generation.
Happily, this physical economic activity will add extra carbon dioxide to our atmosphere and assist the process of photosynthesis in plants. And with this economic expansion, we’ll also reduce air pollution by freeing up city traffic jams by building electric-powered magnetic levitation transport. Coal-fired power stations will continue to use electrostatic precipitators as they do now already, which removes particulate pollution from the chimney stacks.
Numerous scientific studies identify the benefits of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and since current concentration is only at around 390 ppm (parts per million)—in other words a mere 0.039 per cent of the atmosphere by volume, our natural environment is craving for more. For most of the last 600 million years of life on Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration exceeded 1,000 ppm and much of the time, including during the era of the dinosaurs, concentration exceeded 2,000 ppm. To date, 31,487 scientists (9,029 with PhDs) have signed the Global Warming Petition Project debunking the theory of manmade global warming and adding that “there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Australian scientist Professor Bob Carter spelt this out in the Sydney Morning Herald on 27^th June: “Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert, green the planet and feed the world. Ergo, carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor dangerous, but an environmental benefit.”
Numerous scientific studies also indicate that the oceans and sea life will prosper from any additional carbon dioxide. Enhanced nitrogen fixation has been experimentally observed in waters exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide. Studies have also identified that elevated carbon dioxide levels boost iron’s positive impact on phytoplankton productivity.
The oceans contain 39,000 Gt C (gigatonnes of carbon), mostly in the form of bicarbonate ions, whereas the atmosphere currently only contains 830 Gt C. Global energy-related emissions are now a mere 8.3 Gt C per year—a tiny fraction of the 39,000 Gt C stored in the oceans. However, with a global commitment to uplift the bulk of humanity out of poverty—a real moral challenge—industrialising Africa and other poor regions of the world, will fortunately, significantly increase global carbon dioxide emissions.
Over several decades, this biospheric engineering will liberate “locked up carbon” allowing our vegetation and oceans to flourish.
By contrast, Julia Gillard, the Greens, and the Liberal/National coalition all plan to cut emissions by minimally five per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. Not only do they seek to deny nature this life-giving gas, but it shows they also intend to block any plan to rebuild our economy, because there’s no possibility of building major infrastructure and growing our economy without increasing emissions.

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  5^th of August 2011

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au