..being articles on two titans of enlightenment-era science, “special subject Chemistry” essentially – James Lovelock and Eunice Newton Foote (1819 – 1888) – as we now grasp that ecology, molecular biology, atmospheric science, to name but three in as many as FIFTEEN developing fields of hard (that is to say geo-physical & thermodynamic) #science, are not siloed, separate studies but interdependent and co-determinate in causation, such that any technical or engineering management strategies that may be set in train to address what are now the clearly barely if at all and if ever – some say 350 years because of the persistence of carbon dioxide in atmosphere – reversible results of continuing to pump forty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to air EACH YEAR, only one of say 7 – 10 other gases dangerous to ALL the dynamically intertwined forms of (tropospheric) life on earth, which popular newsmedia rarely if at all discuss or deign to share with their readers, listeners or viewers – including nitric oxide from human industrially generated nitrous oxide and other hydrocarbon emissions (surely from any intense heat source including nuclear energy production, I wonder) “which will remain the largest threat in the 21st century to the protective ozone layer” (so reports the US NOAA and EPA, though not at all clearly the #oil- & #gas-corporations corrupted & nonsensised Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment & Water – though to its credit it does mention recent ozone hole emergence over the Arctic as well as alarming, prospectively apocalyptic, enlargement over the Antarctic between the stratosphere and the band of the mesosphere closest to earth, ie at 15 – 40 kilometres above us – which popular newsmedia NEVER dares air to their users for fear of offending the #FossilFuels corporations, banks, financiers, accountancy firms and corporate law-background ‘cyborg’ or droning ‘hubot’ publicist/ podcast wa…rs who provide hundreds of millions in sponsorship to each of the three major Australian political parties as quid pro quo (ha, ha: it is of course ‘in return for..’) BILLIONS in subsidies, rebates and tax holidays, who until very recently imagined they had a permanent revolving-doors stranglehold on federal and State/ Territory government in what is becoming an increasingly impoverished client-state and run-down military base of the United States of America for goodness’ sake.

..sinister and righteous, builders and destroyers, mentally robust working people and the neurocognitively impaired or raving, young people and the billionaires, captive populations around die welt**

..the Dialectics of the Damned, Green Economist global-distribution faxed newsletter 1994 Australia

Here “The Objectivists” Rand, Greenspan, Branden, Manhattan Island 1950’s libert-Aryan mechanomporphic Madison Avenue Edward Bernays Goldman Sachs Blackrock Koch Brothers Klaus Schwab George Soros Gutenberg Galaxy @wef monster-matrix mechanomorphic clockwork universewith endless inane vapid and diseducational strictly evidence-based deracinated logical positivist literally maddening searcheswith endless inane vapid and diseducational strictly evidence-based deracinated logical positivist literally maddening searches with endless inane vapid and diseducational strictly evidence-based deracinated logical positivist literally maddening searches with endless inane vapid and diseducational strictly evidence-based deracinated logical-positivist literally maddening searches.

..with due acknowledgement to William Heath Robinson (May 1872 – September 1944), an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives.

**increasingly morbid due to bad diet and an array of lifestyle problems that have only been exacerbated by post January 2020 #SARSCoV2 infections and now ‘SAND’ or ‘Long Covid’ which as a career public health watcher i find highly problematical, not just in terms of say #NDIS funding and public hospital overloading and loss of staffing but with regard to the functionality of households and child raisers, and even in terms of a discernibly growing public mood of anger and hurt – to which in all fairness it must be added a federal government that is distracted by a certain band of cultural issues but apparently bored by other cutural and lifestyle issues, in particular those pressing upon and even tearing apart the households of working people, especially women and single young mothers, among those millions of us on low and middle incomes – urging the public to get counselling or go visit a general practitioner of medicine for goodness’ sake – and is a one-trick neoliberal pony with respect to key policies across the board like housing, industry, transport, employment, education, household savings, family life, agriculture, disabled people’s support services, rivers, mental health, LOCAL community development and science education to name but a handful of grievously misconceived and largely private-sector business-profit orientated policy development areas largely impelled and shaped by late 19th century Victorian English aristoi establishment religious or oppositional social darwinist gibberisch.. either calling in pompous fusty experts way past their use-bys in social policy, science, technology or ANY public policy including whatever it was they were once famous for, amongst the social toffs, the ABC, Royalty (what is that?), CJ Dennis’s Glugs of Gosh^, newsmedia oinks, the political class, or, wait for it.. what are called today #socialmedia influencers, no? “Here, have a million bucks, man.” South Australia 2023.. or proudly announcing yet another taxation. derivatives & futures market-geared fund for those old rich white folks to play in.

1. Lovelock

‘The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?’

Decca Aitkenhead

Sat 1 Mar 2008 21.35 AEDT

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and “all sorts of fanciful technological stuff”. When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. “It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business,” he said.

“And of course,” Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, “that’s almost exactly what’s happened.”

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

https://3e30338d123bbcd9c3a87deef98b6dd1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we’re trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on – all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? “No we don’t. Because we can’t.” And recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, “on the face of it, a good thing”. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, “but I’ve learnt there’s no point in causing a quarrel over everything”. He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all – renewable energy.

“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

Faced with two versions of the future – Kyoto’s preventative action and Lovelock’s apocalypse – who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock’s readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: “People who say that about me haven’t reached my age,” he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: “Personality.”

There’s more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren’t his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

“Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can’t help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don’t like it because it upsets their ideas.”

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he’s found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. “Oh no! In fact, I’m writing another book now, I’m about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead.”

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose – that’s what people want.”

At moments I wonder about Lovelock’s credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it’s not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth – or Gaia – it is in the purest scientific terms all.

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

With many thanks to The Guardian and interviewer Decca Aitkenhead

2. Foote

Eunice Newton Foote (1819 – 1888) was an american scientist, inventor and women’s rights campaigner. She was the first scientist to conclude that certain gases warmed when exposed to sunlight, and that rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels would change atmospheric temperature and could affect climate. Born in Connecticut, Foote was raised in New York at the centre of social and political movements of her day, such as the abolition of slavery, anti-alcohol activism and women’s rights. She attended the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age seventeen to nineteen, gaining a broad education in scientific theory and practice.

I love the introductory paragraph I chose to print here because it’s a red-hot topical 🚀-up-the-arse for all those men and women so derelict in their scientific and moral senses as to confine the study of our looming man-made global heating apocalypse to chemistry (or to grievously – frankly horrifically – outdated sunscreen or umbrellas WMO television-report meteorology), comprehensively isolated from the enquiring adult liberal education imperatives of environment, society and human cultures and with only ever the vaguest nod to physics or the new atmospheric science by whose agency and impacts our great grandchildren will live or die.

Thanks to Wikipedia, whose entries here provided a comprehensive report on the grievously disturbing responses, both social as well as technical – both sexist (misogynistic) and in fact ideologically Luddite & maliciously obfuscatory – responses of the ‘scientific’ pompous asses and publishers of Eunice Newton Foote’s day.

It is manifestly science as polemic, rhetoric and Saganian bamboozle that has got humanity where it is and INSANELY, PSYCHOTICALLY and MALICIOUSLY continues to, and indeed accelerates the multi-billion dollar entirely PUBLICLY funded pace of utterly disastrous and irrational geo-engineering, the remake of living ecology as an array of YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE consumer- but primarily wealthy investor- fantastically and delsionallly conceived #Econometrics or public realtions and advertising products AND the unable-to-be-scaled-up technical nonsense of capturing carbon dioxide/ monoxide generated by the combustion of fossil fuels vi ignition in an oxygen-feed in containers or deep holes in the ground (a processed powered by – you might never guess – in a heroic effort to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics or at least hoodwink 2 or 3 billion eager secondary-school Google Bard searchers – burning fossil fuel (goodness, yet another totalitarian self-fulfilling prophecy feedback loop dumbdown ploy! This time it’s the automatic writing, or Spirit-writing or “psychography” of artificial “intelligence” algorithms – the Chat GPT extravaganza!

Hands-up all of you who think it’s a really good idea seeing we’ve already managed to irreversibly trash the global environment, to proceed immediately with the demolition of human society after Thatcher & Merkel (both chemists, students will note) AND human culture. Marketise everything man. Are you lazy or a grass-skirt person who smokes stuff?

“Meet the woman who first identified the greenhouse effect”

by Megan Darby

Published 02/09/2016

Eunice Foote demonstrated the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide at a scientific conference in 1856, newly digitised records show 

Irish physicist John Tyndall is commonly credited with discovering the greenhouse effect, which underpins the science of climate change.

Starting in 1859, he published a series of studies on the way greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide trapped heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.

A recently digitised copy of The American Journal of Science and Arts suggests a woman beat him to it, however.

It includes a presentation by Eunice Foote to a top US science conference in 1856. She describes filling glass jars with water vapour, carbon dioxide and air, and comparing how much they heated up in the sun.

“The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas,” she writes, using the contemporary term for carbon dioxide.

“The receiver containing the gas became itself much heated – very sensibly more so than the other – and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling.”

She goes on to speculate that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air could influence global temperatures.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.”

Climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe found Foote’s contribution after a colleague asked why there were no women in the history of the discipline.

Her interest piqued, Hayhoe has approached local historians and Foote’s descendents through a family history website to try and find a picture of her or more information.

Foote’s results were not definitive, Hayhoe says, with too many uncontrolled factors in the experiment. She could not have anticipated that atmospheric CO2 levels would rise from 290 parts per million at the time to 400ppm, prompting a global crisis.

Still, her hypothesis was prescient and a version of her experiment is used to teach high school children today.

“There was a bit of luck involved,” says Hayhoe, “but I think it is amazing that she connected the dots and came to a conclusion that subsequent science has proved to be correct.”

Hayhoe is not the first to resurrect Foote’s legacy. In 2011, independent researcher Raymond Sorensen got an article published in the journal AAPG Search and Discovery.

He relied on an observer’s account of Foote’s presentation, not having access to her own words. The report, by a David Wells in the Annual of Scientific Discovery for 1856, hints at how unusual it was for a woman to appear at such a gathering.

It states: “Prof. Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foote, prefacing it with a few words, to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.”

Eunice Foote, born Newton, would have been unlikely to get the opportunity without the support of her husband, Elisha Foote. Judging by the related paper Elisha presented at the same conference, it seems the married couple worked together.

They feature in The Road to Seneca Falls, an account of the women’s rights movement of the time. Elisha was a judge specialising in patent law and patented several inventions himself, according to author Judith Wellman, including a skate, drying machine and a reaping and binding machine. Eunice patented a “filling for soles of boots and shoes” in 1860.

Tyndall does not appear to have heard of Foote’s work when he started on a similar line of inquiry. His publications are more extensive and include accurate quantification of how much different gases absorbed infrared radiation – “radiant heat” – from the sun.

“With the exception of the celebrated memoir of M. Pouillet on Solar Radiation through the atmosphere, nothing, so far as I am aware, has been published on the transmission of radiant heat through gaseous bodies,” he wrote when presenting his initial results to the Royal Society of London in 1859, as cited by Sorensen.

“With regard to the action of other gases upon heat, we are not, so far as I am aware, possessed of a single experiment.”

It can be hard to assess claims of priority in science, says Sorensen, particularly if work is not in the public domain.

But he adds: “It is clear that Eunice Foote deserves credit for being an innovator on the topic of CO2 and its potential impact on global climate warming.”

Many thanks to Megan Darby

^ a reference with respect to paragraph 5 above

WE THE LOW & MID-INCOME HOUSEHOLDERS OF AUSTRALIA WHO CANNOT PRESENTLY EVEN IMAGINE DECARBONISATION LET ALONE AFFORD IT look on with delight & glee at the big farms & rich people who are having a lovely #energytransition

It’s a WM Hughes KA Murdoch JM Keynes FA von Hayek RG Menzies RG Dahrendorf PA Samuelson aristocratic revolutionary triumph for these petals: a downward-envy, reverse-Robin Hood, reverse-#class #warfare, smash #socialism, belt the s… out of the Proletariat TRIUMPH.

As the world now desperately belatedly contemplates the disruption, chaotic scrambling and even the COLLAPSE of some five or ten thousand years of seasonal weather-systems security, the monied Australian political class revels in a shopping spree for @wartsilacorp gas turbine #electricity #generators and TOTALLY redundant @WECNuclear spinning reserve machines, turns up its nose at Hitachi ABB Grid Power, and laughs & slaps its sides at vandals & madmen trashing rich forest country ecology & waterways for wind turbine towers on behalf of the head-banging Cameron Milner Gautam Adani Annastacia Palusczuk Greg Combet “We’re on your side” climate denialist @AustralianLabor #government.

Whether ‘contemplates’ or ‘addresses’ (moves with alacrity to arrest and later counter) is not in the lap of any gods but of the men now publicly identified as effective #WarCriminals as William Gates, Klaus Schwab, Joe Biden, to name but three of a thousand #global #FossilFuels promoters & #Marketing #nfluencers.

It’s the full Clowncar.

Australians all – and the rest of the world – let us rejoice for we are full of it. #auspol

*choose enlightenment over oblivion – publicists and political party hacks will note the latter is NOT even a good morally & economically bereft “Culture of Brief Announcements Performative Display” look

Story 1..

AFP – Agence France Presse

March 23, 2023

An Australian senator on Thursday claimed she was “assaulted” by police at a rally in Canberra, prompting an official review.

Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe was brought to the ground during an altercation with officers at a small anti-trans event, where she was launching a counterprotest.

Cell phone footage of the incident showed Thorpe trying to burst past police officers toward the protest and being dragged back by a male officer.

As officers tried to help Thrope to her feet she crawled away shouting “let me go”, and then walked away.

The Australian Federal Police said it was aware of the matter, adding that it was under investigation.

“The interactions between the AFP and protesters will be reviewed, and an incident has been referred to the AFP’s Professional Standards Command,” police said in a statemThorpe is known for attention-grabbing protest actions.

Story 2..

Farmers for Climate Action

I’m writing to you from Parliament House where we’ve just hosted an event with farmers we brought here from around the country, joined by the Minister for Agriculture Murray Watt and the Leader of the Nationals and the Shadow Minister for Agriculture David Littleproud.

We were also joined by balance of power Senator David Pocock, Deputy Nationals Leader and Shadow Minister for Water Senator Perin Davey, and many more, including Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, Mark Coulton MP, Brian Mitchell MP, Sam Birrell MP and independent MPs Rebekha Sharkie and Helen Haines. 

It was an event to celebrate the release of our Farming Forever report, and to bring together our amazing climate-smart farming scholars, some of Australia’s very best farmers.

It’s been quite the visit to the nation’s capital. I landed in Canberra at 1pm on Wednesday and by 1.30pm, I was doing a press conference with the Member for Indi Dr Helen Haines and NFF CEO Tony Mahar calling for greater funding for agriculture extension to support farmers to reduce emissions. 

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest report released this week provides a stark backdrop to this important work to secure real emissions reductions and provide the support for farmers across Australia to do their part and secure a prosperous future.

This is our second delegation to Parliament this month, as we continue to push for stronger ambition in the Government’s Safeguard Mechanism reforms, and ensure that farmers are not left to clean up the mess for big polluters.

We couldn’t do this without you.

We rely on donations from supporters like you to do the work we do. Please make a donation today to allow us to continue pushing for strong climate policy that protects Australian farming.

Thank you so much for your support and we look forward to continuing the good work over the next few months.

Kind regards,
Fiona Davis

CEO, FfCA

PS, If you missed the report launch last week you can watch a recording here. Federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt, as well as CEO of NRM regions, Kate Andrews, and farmer Olivia Lawson helped us launch it. It was fantastic and sparked almost endless media! (Did you catch us on Landline?)

Farmers for Climate Action
https://farmersforclimateaction.org.au

Green Economist: What Country, Planet or Universe?

Quantum series logic = valid integrations of represented tropospheric realities complementing supply-side letters & numbers algorithms.

Website or blog is: greeneconomyaction.com Born May 9, 2001 – date of the proclamation of our federation/ Press Delete on the British Foreign Office

~ Two Selected “Green Economist: What Country, Planet or Universe?” Tweets of 22/3/2023, morning Australian/ East Asian time… these are critical political philosophy: peak lunatic genocidal/ ecocidal Friedmanite Neoliberalism

,,more later if my material is still being subjected to bone-headed political interference.

..device update due/ get back 2U

..and a reminder, we are @Greens

@melaniedoak

7B/10 Rampant orgiastic biznisman neoliberalism could only flourish with fake democracy (Michael Kirby’s ‘crude liberal majoritarianism’ which I’ve dubbed ‘-aryanism’ for 20yrs for obvious reasons: post fact neofreudian misogynist rage) & degen’s to electoral autocracy (Modi, &c)

@melaniedoak

7A/10 Re PEAK Neoliberalism, ie. effective abolition of gov’t except for so-called SDoH* & market manipulation, go to CA (Bannon), Crosby, Johnson, Morrison

*oppressive intervention & policing of private lives in the name of ruling-class contrived population data #econometrics

22nd March 2023 expected to be an epochal day in human history. My privilege and indeed honour to help anyone who cares to cut the evil billionaires’ Global Ecological Meltdown crap and get on with their real work.

Handy hints as to the ontological and spiritual direction you will definitively want to take today in the 5 messages from my ‘Dr Strangelove🚀🚀 Yee-hah Musk’ #Twitter account..

John Blundell 🇦🇺

#ESG global development goals essentially

1
Pondering the most socially & politically powerful tropes and memes (social constructs – please see R Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene (you what?),” 1976) of the crazy-arsed 1880’s City of London we may stumble back some decades down a handy if proverbial Memory Lane to our secondary school studies..

2
So here lay the psycho-cultural (mental) foundation of the SA Law Society’s grandiose and socio-economically devastating Theory of Diminished Responsibility:

“In traditional literature a tragic hero is utterly vicious but in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard is not the..

3
“typical tragic man, he’s tragic hero.. impulsive, arrogant & honest, ambitious at the same time.. moral value supported his control over his wife, dau. & lover”

Fark

“..a kind of mysterious & unavoidable power, character, fate, deeply..”.

R Brown 1966.

Enough already.

4
The journalist’s particular ‘roman à thèse’ begins with a drunk dude selling his missus. His brand was in my opinion simple-mindedly socially engineered to counterpoint Cobbet’s epochal socio-economic critique of the brutal early industrial Peterloo Massacre era, Rural Rides, 80yrs before.

5
Roman à thèse
1) A NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE, Nicholas Wilson Pulteney Grammar School Adelaide re “Tess of the Durbervilles”,” a rape & impregnation by a toff story
2) ‘a “thesis novel,” a didactic novel that puts fwd an argument or proposes a solution to some problem of politics, morality, or philosophy @Wickipedia 3) A Roman à thèse (French: ‘thesis novel’) is a novel which is didactic or which expounds a theory. Scholar Susan Suleiman talked about “authoritarian fiction”

6

Reverse Diminished Responsibility: #Fascists demand cops “profile” Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander ppl (or if they behave nicely & do cultural activities & stuff give them bags of💰), vulnerable young women, ethnic minority group members, @Greens or ANYONE fighting corruption

John, and thanks to 1) all thoughtful souls in an anarchic morally-rudderless era of post-truth policy chaos, dysregulated extractive market economism and the directly resultant mental confusion and depressive illness in all age groups, especially young people regimented, harried, emotionally bludgeoned, dumbed down, medicalised, made ill and even killed off for Christ’s supposedly loving sake for the fiscal benefit of psycho-emotionally deranged racist. fascist, misogynist all-round misanthropes & self loathers, multi-millionaire quacks and surgeons

2) Christine Fourner @assoc1counsel Vancouver BC 🇨🇦

Footnote

Thinking of Victorian English law, here’s Julian Barnes’ valuable social document.. perhaps, or arguably, Edmund Burke’s ‘just prejudice’ meets reverse Diminished Responsibility.

‘Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows the separate but intersecting lives of two very different British men: a half-Indian solicitor and son of a vicar, George Edalji, and the world-famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Roughly one-third of the book traces the story of Edalji’s trial, conviction, and imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. About one-third of the book traces the story of Doyle’s life and his relationships with his first wife Louisa Hawkins and his platonic lover Jean Leckie. Roughly one-third of the book concerns Doyle’s attempt to clear the name of Edalji and uncover the true culprit of the crime. Julian Barnes called it “a contemporary novel set in the past” and the book does not aim to stick closely to the historical record at every point.’

I reflect on yet another slab and slough of ‘stocks & flows,’ social indicators and social determinants of #health – metrics, #Econometrics & taxation offsets for earnest #ABC & @SkyNews consumers – urgings to upper middle-income folk to ponder a social-conscience appeasing re-branding of Gross Domestic Product, without uttering a word about markets & overseas trade, budgetary goals & management or good governance let alone what humanity & ecology DEMAND that we IMMEDIATELY invest in and (by the same deliberative intelligent grown-up process) DEFUND.

Endless posture/ gesture/ announcement/ research-finding with strategically inserted tribal visceral clutch is what we are given by the broken neoliberal regime.

This IS @GretaThunberg blah-blah-blah about social – there is no environment in neoclassical discourse – outcomes from political class and academic siloised muppets.

Under the dead weight of neoclassical or so-called western civilisation’s cultural economic hegemony there’s only child development-retarding and adult depressive #mentalillness -inducing STORY: tales & narrative of exploration, adventure, discovery, military conquest, genocidal onslaught, heroism, villainy..

Villainy’s linguistic origin is with the feudal or mediaeval European robber-barons’ villein: serf, peasant, myrmidon, slave. Via sub-intelligent cognitively deranged old white men’s ‘reasoning’ villainy identifies THE POLITICAL LEFT – any political outsider who raises VOICE or even utters one word of complaint or sorrow over their violation, dispossession or oppression.

Here a climate war, there a culture war, a little farther away 10,000 are crushed and a $1m missile is deployed (again by those geriatric nutters to knock out a lost balloon) which invites new stories, from way back in 1785, no? How about China? What?? In the triumphalist post WWII Randite Hayekian Edward Bernays Lynton Crosby scheme of things we’ve rapidly progressed from 1) @Google searches to 2) #ArtificialIntelligence to 3) neofascist autocratic totalit-aryanism, and 4) Nutflux (kiwi pron.) will of course make a movie.

“The market is the market. You can’t argue with the market:” advisor to five USA Presidents John Kenneth Galbraith in “Unweaving the rainbow” (those rhetorician sub-editors again) a joint production of @Deakin-@RadioNational, Australia, on query-postcolonial impoverished countries’ #development.

Understanding & reforming economy is no more about replacing GDP with sociocultural & environmental outcomes econometrics than any so-called Green Left undergraduate cry for an END TO PROFIT or “degrowth,” let alone grass skirts AND AK47s. It’s about the UN #ESG goals: what we produce and how when where & why we do it, for life health longevity, the human love cooperation ethics and futures-vision – absolutely not any kind of monetary crypto-derivative values – this work requires for its success.. its real or human social value.. asking why of supply, demand and market price, recognising all three are human artificial constructs – concepts – driven by enterprisers and copy-writers not holy writ generated by invisible hand, mysterious spirit or wizard in the sky for goodness’ sake.. or in the plea of my newsletter ‘Community Economist’ at a moment when political thugs had erased my gardens, businesses, home and all family relationships for their fun and profit (though that last, personal, disaster did not hit me fully until I retirned from an exile in my own country to be greeted by these dogs thirteen years later):

To Price & Volume (Friedmanite neoliberalism’s ‘gold standard’ WE MUST ADD Quality & Honest Trading.

Or lose the lot. I did not know that then, in 1996. But as a global organic and regenerative agriculture pioneer and energy and weather systems writer I sure did by 2003 – and gave the world a carbon waste-pollution business-as-usual fit-for-human habitation use-by date, 2032, which I guess predictably made me even more the punitive target of political & public service crooks in Adelaide and their playthings the right-wing South Australian Police.

Two weeks ago we’re told Microsoft & Amazon are laying off thousands of postmodern post-fact post-truth vanity-narcissist-influencer Gordon Geckoe cult of individualism morally, culturally, spiritually & ecologically moribund consumer-society know-nothing flaneurs is it?

..life-wasters or in the neoclassical Engels mode social parasites basically stealing money from people’s bank accounts. Glove-puppets in Bill Gates’ World conducting concerted socially-engineered systematic assault on all humans with disposable income after living expenses or #savings – now also widely recognised as the billionaires’ assault on the middle class.

..I must renew* my Amazon Prime whoops I’ve never used it! As if.

..I must act on irregularities with my internet line whoops I don’t have one. As if.

..I must respond to earnest advices of another gangster-outfit calling itself the Telstra and Google Technical Services. Mother of Goodness.

..I must light candles, burn incense and slaughter fatted calves for all of those artificial consumer spender & voter programming algorithms we all so depend upon and cherish.. doing our own thinking for us. Intelligence. Seriously?

Enjoy this short note about the Davos haute bourgeois Thought Bomb, Klaus Schwab’s and so-o-o belatedly George Soros’s swansongs. Never forget to laugh at delusional nonsense of entrepreneurial spruiking. It’s NOT AT ALL unkind to sneer or even hit hard if these charlatans are making themselves the enemies of humanity. It’s essential. It’s exactly like proudly holding up your personal humanity licence for all to see in Elon’s public square.

..or the Milton Friedman orgiastic profiteering via regulatory exemption plan will plough slough and sludge itself literally to the death – yours and mine.

..as we all now realise our situation HAS NO CONNECT with the ‘rotten apples’ of @Nickelodeon, bad psychiatry, trash-culture cops & robbers or cowboys ‘n “injuns” – native North American people – but all of us.

John
Wednesday midday 08022023

So yeah, here it was the forerunner document to the above/ Friday evening in Southern Australia 20/1/2023 >>

Klaus Schwab’s 2-dimensional Analogue “Newtonian Mechanics”^^ Global Economy is Broken

On LinkedIn, Ian Kaplan, ‘bringing people together..’ with our thanks“$250,000 to attend Davos as a formal delegate at the annual World Economic Forum event??!! (link below)

“COP28 to be led by an oil company CEO??!!

“Is it any surprise when there are calls for an alternative framework to WEF, COP, etc. as the place to come together to discuss and take action on the climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and social inequality caused by the flawed system we live in?

“It’s time to boycott these frameworks and make them irrelevant.

“NOW.

“There’s no time to wait and see what happens.

“Wheels are already in motion for an alternative framework for bringing people together based on bioregions, negating the ability of industry lobbies to torpedo efforts for change, negating the setting of a core global agenda by established institutions opposed to changing the existing political economy, and negating their ability to determine who can and who can’t participate and be heard. The alternative framework includes a mechanism for encouraging and facilitating continuous action and progress, including measuring progress towards clear goals. ALL with a positive message!

“Looking for partners who have had enough of the BS. Feel free to reach out.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=l6aYoEFFHYw%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

^^ the Push Me Pull You Marx-Engels-Thatcher-& yes, evidently -Merkel – stemmie sighin’-tests’ (to use the Australian baby-talk) NO society/ don’t worry about that left-wing stuff, those groups, those activists/ how dare they disrupt our nineteenth century neoclassical theory and methodology? – oowhh/ yuck/ atheists too – the monetarist-wonderland dialectical ‘Rand-span’ Objectivist Zero Sum Game = the global ecological meltdown-threatening SUPPLY SIDE gang-bang

* “I’m calling to tell you your Amazon Prime is being renewed for $99.00. If you don’t want this prescription Dial 1” – THIS is not fiction. It first came to my notice in February last year when despite my skills, knowledge and emotional maturity this huge and sophisticated organised crime outfit from “Mountain View” stole $2,500 from my bank account and the bank, Bendigo Bank declined to reimburse me despite the money being initially deposited into an Australian bank account. And NOW, a year later, I’ve had four calls this week. The Australian minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neill claims to be angry about cyber-crime. I call bullshit.

JB

Introduction: The struggle to expose to public scrutiny the ecocidal and genocidal tyranny of Rand and Greenspan’s amoral depersonalising deracinating community-destroying Friedmanite anarcho-libertarian dysregulated neoliberalism – the end of government except as a mute, blind, near voiceless beyond tweets, media-conference grabs and other brief announcements or slogans, near unresponsive, socially- and environmentally-indifferent client of, and facilitator for, corporate accountants, lawyers, sub-intelligent advertising agencies, monumentally economically-illiterate frank lunatic fundamentalist Christian churches – the now irreversible and virtually irreparable assault on humanity in its entirety by plutocrats, organised crime cartels, Gateses, Bezoses, Musks, and Gautam Adanis – continues apace./ John

With thanks to Stephen Sackur @BBCworld..

Wirth Zsuzsanna 2023.01.19.

Have a good story? Contact us!

Documents prove that pro-government businessmen own a number of private equity funds with vast fortunes whose owners have so far remained secret, Direkt36 has learned, using data obtained from a state register.

Among other things, Direkt36 learned the following:

• It turns out that Lőrinc Mészáros, a friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and one of the wealthiest Hungarians, has interest in even more private equity funds than he had been associated with in the press.
• István Száraz, who is a friend of the central bank director’s son, Ádám Matolcsy, is the ultimate beneficial owner of almost 11 per cent of the Hungarian superbank Magyar Bankholding.
• Two private equity funds are owned by a Pécs real estate trader named Áron Hornung, who did business with billionaire investor Dániel Jellinek and has several links to Orbán’s son-in-law’s business partner, Endre Hamar. Hornung’s name has not hit the news before, although last year he took out dividends of HUF 13.5 billion from just one of his companies.
• The private equity fund that won the Hungarian motorway concession for 35 years – in a consortium with six other private equity funds – belongs to billionaire László Szíjj, a business associate of Lőrinc Mészáros.

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The special rules applying for private equity funds offer investors the possibility to hide huge fortunes. While in the case of traditional companies anyone can obtain official information about their ownership and finances with a few minutes of online research, private equity funds are different.

It is a form of investment in which a closed circle of investors can put their money and grow their wealth without being subject to company disclosure rules. The money is held by a fund manager company on behalf of the investors. The ownership of the fund manager is public, but it is not possible to find out whose money is in the private equity fund they manage.

Private equity funds exist in many countries around the world, primarily for investment purposes. In Hungary, however, a few years ago, the business elite close to the government saw the potential of their secrecy and started using them like offshore companies are used elsewhere: to increase their wealth in complete secrecy.

As a result, private equity funds have multiplied in Hungary, and hundreds of billions of HUF worth of wealth have been transferred to them. A series of fund managers linked to billionaires close to the government have built ever larger portfolios. Money has been invested in almost every sector of the economy. Private equity funds own, for example, the 35-year-old Hungarian motorway concession, hotel chains, dozens of Budapest’s luxurious palaces, restaurants, banks, industrial companies, waste treatment plants and many others. Valuable state-owned properties and companies have also been transferred to private equity funds, ultimately enriching the wealth of unknown individuals. Last year, business site G7 estimated that the total anonymity scheme was so widespread among large investors that by 2021, 3.5 percent of all Hungarian companies’ profits were realized in private equity funds.

Direkt36 has now found the ultimate beneficial owners of about a fifth of the operating private equity funds, 26 in total, in a state database managed by the tax authority NAV. This is a register of beneficial ownership, created in response to an EU requirement and currently available to anyone for a small fee.

It is not clear whether the ultimate beneficial owners of private equity funds should be included in the register maintained by the NAV. There are conflicting laws and different definitions of who should be considered the ultimate beneficial owner.

When Direkt36 asked NAV for guidance on this, they replied that we should direct our questions to the Prime Minister’s Office. They did not elaborate on what the government apparatus had to do with the issue of private equity funds, which in principle belongs entirely to the business world. The Cabinet Office, however, responded to our inquiry by saying that “we strongly refute even the suggestion that the Prime Minister’s Office has any jurisdiction over the ownership registry of Hungarian private equity funds”.

We asked for reactions to our article from all relevant fund managers and beneficial owners but received no response from most of them. Two fund managers – Quartz and Opus Global – replied that they could not disclose information about owners and investments. Among other things, Áron Hornung wrote that we were inaccurate about him, but he declined to specify which of our claims he disputed. Közép-Európai Kockázati és Magán Tőkealapkezelő Zrt., which according to the NAV database manages Hornung’s funds, said that the database contained incorrect data due to a bank administrative error, but did not specify who the real owners of the funds were. (Update: After the publication of our article, 4iG’s head of communications indicated that two private equity funds were wrongly linked to Lőrinc Mészáros in the database – presumably also due to a bank administrative error – and that they are in fact owned by Gellért Jászai, the head of 4iG.)

Main findings

According to Direkt36’s research, out of the total of 119 private equity funds registered by the Hungarian National Bank, 37 reported their beneficial owners to NAV’s system, but 11 of these only identified persons who, as managers of the fund, can make decisions about the investment of the fund’s money, but do not have a stake. The extent of their interest varies between 39 and 100 per cent.

Of those with an interest, 17 private equity funds belong to clearly pro-government owners, but a further five are also closely linked to pro-government business circles. Among them are well-known billionaires such as István Száraz, László Szíjj, Lőrinc Mészáros, Zsolt Hernádi and Gellért Jászai. Lőrinc Mészáros is the most prominent: he has a 100 per cent stake in nine private equity funds, and another two belong to his corporate lawyer, József Tamás Kertész.

These are what we found out about the funds:

1. Lőrinc Mészáros’ private equity funds are in fact even more extensive than the collections published in the press so far have shown. The Manhattan and Repro I private equity funds have so far been linked to Gellért Jászai because he owns the fund management company, but the actual ownership records show that the 100 per cent ultimate beneficial owner is Lőrinc Mészáros. At present, one property in Normafa is linked to Repro I, and Manhattan owns 1.6 percent of the shares in the IT giant 4iG, which is managed by Gellért Jászai. (Update: After the publication of our article, the communications manager of 4iG amended that the two private equity funds have actually been owned by Jászai Gellért for years, and the NAV records contain outdated data. The banks managing the accounts are responsible for updating the data and identifying the actual owners.)
2. Private equity funds called Eirene and Metis, which own almost 15 percent of the shares of Magyar Bankholding, the Hungarian superbank to be established this year, were previously known to be linked to Lőrinc Mészáros through the fund manager Opus Global, now the actual ownership records officially indicate too, that the shares actually belong to Viktor Orbán’s friend.
3. It has also become certain that the giant private equity fund Konzum PE’s ultimate beneficial owner is Lőrinc Mészáros. The Hungarian press, for example Átlátszó and Válasz Online, has been following in detail the investments of the fund, which is the largest owner of Opus Global Plc, the flagship of the Mészáros business empire. In addition, it owns several large food companies and a mineral water company, the Hunguest Hotels hotel chain and the Balatontourist camping network, as well as several lavish Andrássy Avenue properties in Budapest.
4. According to the beneficial ownership registry, Mészáros also owns the private equity funds Global Alfa, Status Next, Status Food and Status Property. These include, among others, interests in the turkey processing company Gallicoop, a PET recycling plant in Karcag, the former officers’ casino palace near Ferenciek Square in Budapest, which used to be the headquarters of MKB Bank, and the transformer manufacturer Ganz Ltd. The latter was partially acquired by the private equity fund Prime Property early last year. Along with Prime Finance, this private equity fund is not owned 100 percent by Lőrinc Mészáros, but by one of his confidants, the lawyer József Tamás Kertész, who often handles the legal affairs of his companies. Kertész also works for 4iG and is the founder of the government-owned media foundation KESMA.
5. István Száraz, who is a friend of Ádám Matolcsy, the son of the Hungarian National Bank’s president, ultimately owns 10.8 per cent of the shares in the new superbank, Magyar Bankholding, which will be created later this year. This was not clear until now, only that the ultimate beneficial owner of the shares is Uncia private equity fund (indirectly through two Luxembourg companies, both called Blue Robin, and two other Hungarian companies). Now, the beneficial ownership records show that this fund is 100 per cent owned by István Száraz.
6. István Száraz appears to be the beneficial owner of another private equity fund, too. According to the register, he has a 100 per cent in Felis private equity fund. The fund is managed by Quartz Fund Management. Quartz, formerly owned by Mr. Száraz and now owned by a private equity fund, manages a range of investment funds and thus holds billions of HUF in assets. Válasz Online has previously found Felis behind a number of companies, including the premium deli chain Culinaris, the Black Swan cocktail bar in the Pest party district and the Pine Weekendhouse in Balatonkenese. The latter was backed by state tourism funds. Felis Private Equity Fund used to be the owner of the Lánchíd 19 Design Hotel near Várkert Bazár. The same is the case with one of the most exclusive plots in the Buda Castle District at Ostrom Street. It also owns a large office in Vörösmarty Square.
7. A name not previously reported in the press emerges as the 92 and 93 percent owner of the private equity funds Közép-Európai I and Közép-Európai II, which formerly owned the Dürer Garden property. These funds can also be linked to István Tiborcz’s business partner and friend Bálint Szécsényi, as he runs the company managing them. However, the actual owner listed in the ownership register is not Bálint Szécsényi, but a certain Áron Hornung, who is linked to István Tiborcz’s business circle. Hornung is from the Southern Hungarian town Pécs and works there as a real estate agent and office manager of the Duna House real estate agency. In the meantime, however, he also owns or has owned billions of HUF in assets through his companies. For example, he founded a company called PLZ-Asset, which bought Pécs Plaza, then in 2020 was bought by a real estate fund of one of the country’s richest men, real estate investor Daniel Jellinek. The same happened to PLZ Office, a company that owns an office building in Pécs. It was also set up by Hornung and has since been acquired by Jellinek. Fagales Zrt., a real estate management company founded in 2017, of which Hornung is both the CEO and sole shareholder, has brought Hornung huge profits, and last year had a net profit of nearly HUF 10 billion. Hornung has approved a dividend payment of 13.5 billion forints to himself, according to public company documents. Hornung’s extraordinary business success went unnoticed in the press despite the fact that Fagales Zrt. was among the top 500 companies for 2022 as the most profitable company in Baranya County. Hornung also knows Endre Hamar, a former schoolmate and business partner of István Tiborcz in Pécs. Hamar and Hornung are not only Facebook friends, but in photos uploaded to Facebook in 2010 they are sitting at the same table in a club. (Közép-Európai Kockázati és Magán Tőkealapkezelő Zrt., which manages the funds, sent a statement shortly before the publication of this article stating that Hornung is not the real owner of the private equity fund, but that there was only an administrative error at the bank, but still did not say who the real owner was, citing legal reasons. When contacted, Áron Hornung replied that he and his family had been involved in real estate investment for nearly 20 years and called our claims untrue and inaccurate on several points. However, he declined to specify exactly which allegations he disputed. István Tiborcz’s communications manager promised to answer our questions later, and Endre Hamar’s law firm declined to respond. Dániel Jellinek told Direkt36 that to his knowledge, Áron Hornung is a well-known real estate owner in Baranya County, who managed to turn Pécs Plaza into a well-managed project, which is why Jellinek’s Indotek Group decided to buy the shopping centre from him.)
8. Zoltán Szabadics, an entrepreneur from Zala County, is the 100 per cent beneficial owner of the Közép-Európai VI private equity fund, according to the NAV registry. Szabadics’s father, József Szabadics, founded the family’s construction group, and Zoltán holds senior positions in several of the group’s companies. He is also the chairman of the board of directors of BAHART, a Balaton shipping company belonging to the state’s Tourism Agency, and has also received a medal from former President János Áder. One of his companies received a HUF 1.7 billion grant from the state Kisfaludy programme. The Közép-Európai Kockázati és Magán Tőkealapkezelő Zrt., which manages the fund, stated shortly before the publication of our article that Szabadics was not the real owner of the private equity fund, and that there had been an administrative error in the bank mixing up the data, but still did not say who the real owner was, citing legal reasons.
9. Zsolt Hernádi, CEO of Hungarian oil company Mol, is not only the manager of the Solva private equity fund through a company, but is also a 100 per cent owner, the beneficial ownership register shows. The fund has previously bought a company and two hotels in the town of Esztergom.
10. László Szíjj, Lőrinc Mészáros’s billionaire business partner, also appears in the beneficial ownership database as the owner of a private equity fund called Themis. This means the fund is not only managed by his company, but the billionaire is also the beneficial owner. This fund (in consortium with seven other private equity funds) won the procurement process offering the right to operate Hungarian motorways for 35 years.

Below you can see the ultimate beneficial owners, who are businessmen close to the government or persons connected to them:

Name of private equity fund	Beneficial owner(s)	Percentage of interest
EIRENE	Mészáros Lőrinc	78
EKHO	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
Felis	Száraz István Péter	100
Global Alfa	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
iG TECH	Jászai Gellért Zoltán	100
Konzum PE	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
Közép-Európai I.	Hornung Áron	93
Közép-Európai II.	Hornung Áron	92
KÖZÉP-EURÓPAI VI.	Szabadics Zoltán	100
Manhattan	Mészáros Lőrinc*	100
METIS	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
PRIME FINANCE	Dr. Kertész József Tamás	100
PRIME PROPERTY	Dr. Kertész József Tamás	100
REPRO I.	Mészáros Lőrinc*	100
Solva	Hernádi Zsolt Tamás	80
STATUS FOOD	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
STATUS NEXT	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
STATUS PROPERTY	Mészáros Lőrinc	100
THEMIS	Szíjj László	100
UNCIA	Száraz István Péter	100

(For the other identified beneficial owners, no clear public or political affiliation was found, so we decided not to disclose their names.)

(After publication, Gellért Jászai’s 4iG has said, these private equity funds currently belong to Gellért Jászai.)

How come private equity funds appear in the beneficial ownership registry?

It is probably because the system was set up barely a year and a half ago, and because of the complexity of the regulations, that made it possible that some of the beneficial owners of private equity funds have appeared in the NAV registry.

The 2021 law on the establishment of a de facto register of beneficial owners does not name private equity funds, so they are not specifically covered by the regulation, which means they can continue to keep secret who their main investors are. However, they do have bank accounts and another law, the Anti-Money Laundering Act, requires banks that maintain accounts to keep records of the beneficial owners of legal entities. Thus, the beneficial owner of some of the private equity funds may appear in the NAV register even though they should not be there officially.

As the law and the database are new and the regulation is complicated, banks appear to have chosen different solutions of declaring who owns the funds and who should be considered the beneficial owner. A guide on how to determine the beneficial owner in complex cases – “complex ownership structures” – is available on the Hungarian National Bank’s website. And while it is detailed and covers a lot of subjects from identifying foremen to dealing with offshore companies, it does not specifically address the case of private equity funds.

But in their case, it is not at all clear who the beneficial owner should be: the person holding the majority of the shares (at least 25 per cent according to the law)? Or the manager of the management company? In the case of private equity funds, the people who put their money into the fund cannot formally decide how it is invested, because this is decided by the management of the company managing the private equity fund. However, these managers do not have a share in the fund, so profit always goes to the investors.

In the Hungarian practice however, personal links between the fund manager and the owners of the fund are presumably very common. This is also shown by documents downloaded by Direkt36, which basically show that people with shares in private equity funds also have influence on the fund management companies, or even own them outright.

The EU created it, the Curia ruled against it

As part of the fight against money laundering, the European Union already instructed Member States in 2015 to start keeping a central register of beneficial owners of companies and other legal entities registered in their territory. Such a database is a dream of investigative journalists and anti-corruption organizations, as it makes it harder for owners hiding behind offshore companies to hide their assets. However, investors seeking to increase their wealth in secret were clearly not happy about this.

Member States were reluctant, with only a few of them having created the database by the 2017 deadline. In the meantime, partly in response to the scandal induced by the publication of the Panama Papers stories, which exposed a series of offshore secrets, the EU has moved even further towards transparency, and a subsequent 2018 directive required that the identity of beneficial owners be made public. This means that not only public authorities but also ordinary citizens have the right to know the identity of the beneficial owners.

The actual ownership registers were then established in this spirit across Europe. Hungary was one of the last in 2021. The register is managed by the tax authority, and banks are required to report the data to the system monthly. The banks are entrusted with this task because they manage the accounts of companies, subsidiaries, law firms, pension funds and a range of other legal entities. At the opening of the account and later, in the event of a change of details, banks are obliged to ask their customers for a declaration of the identity of the beneficial owner, which they forward to the NAV register. In principle, mainly authorities have access to the database, but under EU rules, anyone can know the identity of the beneficial owner by paying HUF 1 500 (approx. 4 euros) per account.

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However, the Hungarian system, which came into operation in 2021, may not be with us for much longer. The EU has seen a series of lawsuits against the disclosure of data, and at the end of November last year, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Curia, ruled that it is not okay for anyone to know the identity of the actual owners.

Only a few hours after the ruling, Luxembourg switched off its own registry, and the Netherlands followed suit the next day. In the following days, Austria, Belgium, Malta and Germany also ended open access. The Hungarian system is still available.

Dániel Szőke contributed to this article.

MAGÁNTŐKEALAPTÉNYLEGES TULAJDONOS

DIREKT36

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..and Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service proudly boasted through the voice of its co-premier newsreader as late as October 2022 that it did (facts) “not opinion.”

‘Justice denied: Indigenous women and children still face a legal system stacked against them’

With our thanks to the #ABC.. and to Dr McGlade

I must also explain that this article by Dr McGlade was subject to deliberate management-ordered restriction and suppression of airing. I’m a human rights advocate who spent two decades working for our old people and the kids. I am therefore an avid reader of anything that might help us to expunge white racism, feudal British overlordship and police & redneck neonazi killings, but I did not see this outing until today, searching HMcG. John Blundell SA

By Hannah McGlade

Posted Thu 22 Sep 2016 at 9:43amThursday 22 Sep 2016 at 9:43am

At a time when media attention is quite rightly focused on ending family violence, Aboriginal women and girls still face unacceptably high levels of assault, homicide and intimidation. 

Research shows that Aboriginal mothers in Western Australia are 17.5 times more likely to die from homicide than a non-Aboriginal mother. 

Aboriginal mothers are also at increased risk of suicide related to factors including intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. 

There is considerable evidence establishing the extent and nature of the violence experienced by Aboriginal women. 

A historic resolution passed at the last session of the UN’s Human Rights Council condemns violence against Indigenous women. 

It reiterates the duty of states to exercise due diligence to provide protection to Indigenous women and girls, including by all appropriate means of a legal, political, administrative and social nature to provide access to justice. 

But a major issue faced by Aboriginal women is the lack of responsiveness by the Australian justice system. 

Australia has made a commitment to combatting violence against women, including Indigenous women, through a National Plan of Action. 

The National Plan includes provisions aimed at strengthening Indigenous communities. It includes strategies to foster the leadership of Indigenous women in community and wider society, building community capacity and improving access to support services.

The plan also refers to Indigenous women under strategies aimed at ensuring justice responses are effective and perpetrators are held accountable. 

However, there is little mention of Indigenous women and the difficulties faced in accessing justice, other than the Family Violence Prevention Legal Service which does its utmost to support women and which urges law reforms to ensure access to justice.

In 1994 the Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry ‘Equality before the law’ reported that:

“Of all the identifiable groups of women whose concerns have been presented to the Commission, Aboriginal … women are least well served by the legal system…. The reality experienced by most Indigenous women is that the law provides them with little or no protection. In particular, few men who commit violent assaults against indigenous women are made accountable for these non-Indigenous or Indigenous crimes.”

This finding remains highly relevant today, more than 20 years after this historic inquiry. 

These women’s stories are just a few that have caused considerable concern of bias in the administration of justice:

Andrea Pickett

Andrea Pickett was 39 years old when she was murdered by her ex-partner Kenneth in 2009. 

Recently released from prison for acts of violence against her, Kenneth murdered Andrea as she tried to flee with her infant. Andrea feared for her safety and that of her 13 children and she had done her utmost to seek protection from the justice system. 

Having heard the ways in which the system had failed Andrea, I assisted her family to have her death examined by the Coroner. This in itself was a difficult task as the deaths of Indigenous women are not routinely examined by the Coroner. 

The Coroner who later investigated Andrea’s death noted that she had made many complaints to the police that were simply written off without investigation. The few responses that occurred were minimal and ineffective. She also sought help from the parole board and support agencies who failed to provide protection. 

The police advised the Coroner they had conducted their own investigation into her death and found numerous failures on part of investigating officers. 

They said that they now implemented a system wide policy change to address victim safety. The coroner accepted this submission and made no recommendations aimed at police. 

While important systemic reforms were introduced as a result of the inquest, Indigenous women’s experience of discrimination in accessing justice was not identified or addressed. 

Ms Dhu

The case of a young Aboriginal woman, known for cultural reasons as Ms Dhu, showed similar patterns of negative police conduct in relation to Indigenous women’s victimisation. 

Ms Dhu was arrested by police and taken into police custody on August 2, 2014. 

She was a victim of domestic violence and in urgent need of medical help. 

The police were not interested in and did not investigate her evidence of an assault. They also – fatally – did not believe her when she told them she was injured and in need of help.

Ms Dhu was pronounced dead on August 4, 2014 – two days after being taken into custody. The cause of her death in police custody was medical conditions arising from injuries previously inflicted on her as a victim of domestic violence. 

I observed the Coroner’s court as it showed disturbing CCTV footage of young Ms Dhu in the cells. We saw her crying and moaning in pain, calling out for help from police officers who ignored her cries. Dying, she was cuffed and dragged through the lockup as one might ‘drag a dead kangaroo’ an Aboriginal elder said. 

While the officers took Ms Dhu to hospital, they told medical staff that Ms Dhu was “faking it”. The medical staff did not undertake basic procedures, such as a temperature or X-rays, and she did not receive treatment that could have saved her. 

The police involved in Ms Dhu’s shocking death were disciplined by way of reprimand, but none were dismissed and most have now been promoted. 

To this day no one has been charged in relation to her death.

Observing the Coroner’s court I saw little attention paid to Ms Dhu as an Aboriginal victim of domestic violence. There was no acknowledgement of Aboriginal partner violence, the interplay of race and gender and the inhumane treatment she received. 

Lynette Daley

I could list many more cases including that of Lynette Daley, mother of seven, who died in 2011 following violent sexual acts on her by non-Aboriginal men. 

While the investigating police officers and the state Coroner recommended that charges be laid against those men, the Crown prosecutors did not accept their recommendation and declined to lay any charges at all. 

According to her family, “They didn’t care about her. You know, it was just another Indigenous girl, we’ll sweep it under the carpet.” 

This year, almost five years after Lynette’s death, the Crown reversed its decision in the face of considerable media (including a Four Corners report) and a public campaign for justice in the victim’s name. 

Indigenous Professor Marcia Langton, in considering such cases, has recently asked:

“Is our legal system tolerating and even encouraging the femicide of Indigenous women? I think it is,” she concluded. 

Article 22 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides Indigenous women with the right to access justice and protection against violence. 

These cases, and the deaths of many Aboriginal women and mothers, highlight the need for greater commitment to ensuring equality before the law for Indigenous women and further development of strategy and policy to increase Indigenous women’s access to justice:

• Talk more with Indigenous women to ensure the justice system responds to the race, gender and sometimes disability issues that they face;
• measures to ensure the full participation of Indigenous women in the administration of justice, including training and employment as police, lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, judges and coroners;
• human rights programs aimed at law enforcement and judiciary.

We urgently require the development of these domestic human rights responses that seek to acknowledge and respond to the multilayered experiences of Aboriginal women in accessing justice and seeking protection from violence. 

Hannah McGlade is a human rights lawyer, writer and social justice activist. This is an edited version of remarks she made as part of a panel discussion on Indigenous women and violence at the 33rd session of the UN Human Rights Council

On and on the trillion-dollar go-nowhere STEM #science #spend goes, its promoters, acolytes and politician dupes so ensconced, embedded, entrenched and convinced of their own virtue in both their ecologically devastating AND in their “innocuous” but tragically marginal, superficial, tokenistic or wrong-headed, frankly POINTLESS & ILLOGICAL & middle class aspirational-values & attitudes social studies, their high-end tourism, recreational, conservation and social welfare do-gooding, their VANITY PROJECTS, that the entire low-income world condemns, derides and is flatly ANGRY about.

As with the Old Testament Abrahamic saw Vanity, vanity/ All is useless, POINTLESS except of course to transfer hundreds of millions of PUBLIC funding – or working people’s tax contributions – not upper middle income people’s let alone those of the rich – Series 3?/ unintelligible deliberately obscure acronym/ slogan/ catchcry/ rhetorical flourish/ Sky News high-paid cookers – to plainly unaccounted for churches, charities, grifter business enterprises, frankly corrupt (on the take/ ‘living the life of Reilly’/ answerable to none) public authorities and VERY high-priced technically, scientifically & sociologically off-the-air #AADs, #CSIROs & #BoMs to name but three… in a nutshell Mr Albanese’s now faltering 2013 #infrastructure “mates.” Rob Sitch? Good grief – an entire nation at the mercy of grifters who don’t get stuff, we’re flying high and flying blind, Oi-oi

But NO-ONE in “developed” industrial countries dares whistleblow this VAST barking-mad deflection of funds from decarbonisation and authentic bottom-up community development, out of real fear of murder or traumatic misadventure at the hands of organised crime gangs (“bikies,” Aboriginal & other ethnic criminal thugs + our own Trump-Bannon-Musk Blood & Soil “very fine gentlemen” – loosely, neonazis and #cookers) in the virtual employ of, at the beck and call of, state or federal police or military personnel engaged on colonial-era “blackfella- or “Injun-“ shooting frontiers/ border-zones or in so-called interventions in any given region or country.

False & Arbitrary Imprisonment in breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on 16 Dec 1966 is the coercive and criminalising legal weapon of choice of authorities and in Australia all three major political parties and of the racist sexist neofascist political Right worldwide – whose political game has always been Iusuf Dzhugashvili’s fabled ‘person/ problem no-person/ no-problem’ saw

..as I myself experienced on nine occasions between 1996 & 2008 in Australia BECAUSE I was a renowned regenerative and genuine organic pioneer AND prominent energy reformer and NOT in consequence of the commission of any criminal offence

John Blundell,

Economics Ecology & Human Health. Australia