Showing posts with label Socialism or your money back. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialism or your money back. Show all posts

Monday 27 January 2014

Just A Mirror Of America


      January 26 was Australia Day, when the colonial power raised its flag and pompously paraded as if Australia was an empty land found by the imperialists of the West. The parade showed no hint of the bloodshed, plundering, genocide ethnic cleansing and slavery that is the foundation of Australia.
     This article from Socialism Or Your Money Back helps to put that in perspective.
     The imperial wars and massacres (guns vs spears) such as those at Hawksbury, Nepean Richmond Hill, Risdon Cove, Appin, Bathurst, Port Phillip, Swan River (Battle of Pinjarra), Gravesend, Vinegar Hill, Myall Creek, Kinroy, Rufus R, Long lagoon, Dawson River, Kalkadoon, Cape Grim, the Black war, McKinley River, and West Kimberely were resisted by Aboriginal warriors like Pemulwuy, Winradyne, Multuggerah, Yagan, and Jandamarra. These wars, along with starvation and Western diseases decimated the dispossessed Aboriginal population to about 70,000 by 1920.
      Australia's First Peoples were marginalised onto reservations and missions, restricted entry into white towns, exploited as unpaid slave labour, their indigenous languages and sacred rituals forbidden, and mixed blood children (The Stolen Generations) were forcibly kidnapped from their parents for resocialisation - ie to be made "white". Until the 1967 referendum in Australia, Aborigines were government property: "The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one's own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have."
Read the full article HERE:

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Tuesday 26 February 2013

"Whodunnit"


       I haven't said much on the "horse meat scandal", I see it all as just one of the many aspects of the profit driven system that we have allowed to dominate our lives. The very nature of getting wealthy on the backs of others requires subterfuge, somebody has to be conned somewhere. This is just one, that for whatever reason, that babbling brook of bullshit, the media, has decided to trumpet. It is not the only "scandal" that weaves its way through the smoke and mirrors of this corrupt and exploitive system, it is just the one that is in the news.
I found this an interesting article from Socialism or Your Money Back:
 Customer to the Butcher: A pound of mince, please
Butcher to the Customer: Aye, neigh bother.


      Who is responsible for the horsemeat scandal?  "Not us’ say the government (even though they cut the number of food inspectors). ‘Nor us’, say the supermarket bosses. "Us neither" say the suppliers. "It wasn't us" say the abattoirs. As in every good ‘Whodunnit’ drama, we are looking for a bad guy. The French and then the Romanians were first to be blamed, now it is organised crime and the Mafia. The Swedes blamed the French company Spanghero who also deny the charge. The Netherlands said the Cyprus-based meat vendor Draap that sold the meat to Spanghold was responsible, and the company’s track record would suggest the Dutch had a point. In 2012 Draap was convicted of selling South American horsemeat labeled at German and Dutch beef. Draap — run by a trust in the British Virgin Islands — is owned by the company Guardstand, that in turn owns part of the arms dealing company, Ilex Ventures. According to prosecutors in New York, convicted international arms dealer Viktor Bout owns Ilex Ventures. Guardstand’s sole shareholderis Trident Trust, which sets up companies in tax-free nations. Guardstand helped set up Ilex.
Read the full article HERE:

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