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.”
^^ 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.
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
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
..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
Posted Thu 22 Sep 2016 at 9:43amThursday 22 Sep 2016 at 9:43am
Ms Dhu’s image projected on a building in Perth, as a campaign for the release of CCTV footage continues.(Supplied)
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 killed by her estranged husband Kenneth despite a violence restraining order.(7pm TV News WA)
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
Ms Dhu died in police custody in South Hedland in WA in August 2014(Supplied: Carol Roe)
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
Lynette Daley died of internal bleeding after being sexually assaulted.(Supplied)
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.”
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
Reflecting on yet a another think-puddle of econometrics & 45-years behind the clock stocks & flows social indicators garbage about reconstructing Gross Domestic Product without saying a blind thing about markets or money let alone what governments SHOULD spend money on – only endlessly as ever in @GretaThunberg blah-blah-blah about social outcomes from political class and academic HEADBANGERS today on #ABC Radio in #auspol I am moved to add a couple more thoughts (to the outing c.10 paragraphs below..
At moments like this in human history genuine economists certainly are moved to commentary – bean counters and gross accumulators may go. Just go you dementing losers.
Understanding & reforming economy is no more about replacing GDP with sociocultural & environmental outcomes econometrics than any Stop the World undergraduate cry for “degrowth,” let alone grass skirts or AK47s. It’s about the UN #ESG goals: what we produce and how when where & why we do it, for life health longevity and the human love and cooperation act & ethic/ fact & value 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 not holy writ generated by invisible hand, mysterious spirit or wizard in the sky for goodness’ sake..
This week we learn Microsoft & Amazon are laying off thousands [of postmodern post-fact Dunning-Kruger Effect vanity-narcissist-influencer Gordon Geckoe cult of individualism morally, culturally, spiritually & ecologically moribund consumer-society know-nothing flaneurs] of life-wasters basically stealing money from people’s bank accounts.
..I must renew* my Amazon Prime whoops I don’t use the thing. As if.
..I must act on irregularities with my internet line whoops I don’t have one. As if.
..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. Never forget to laugh at delusional nonsense spruiking. It’s NOT unkind if its charlatans making themselves the enemies of humanity. It essential. Or they’ll prevail as they have since Milton Friedman’s orgiastic profiteering via regulatory shutdown.
And as we all now realise it won’t just be about those rotten apples but all of us – all the young leastwise.
John Friday evening 20/1/23
So yeah, here it was >>
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.”
I know: let’s get a hardware store garden 🪴🥸
^^ 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
^^ Zero Sum=Maximum Sun – how we all relish the prospect within 2 -3 years of 58°C summer days in temperate zones🤓🙄😕
* “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.
This from Mario Russo: “Albasleasy complains about the previous ten years. Now in charge he and Blowhard Bowan (sic) destroy our power system, forcing prices to blow out and still cannot offer certainly of supply..”
And from Robin Tully: “They took the money for 10 years and did nothing. Now they hand out money to anything and everything as a cover for their incompetence.”
plus David NSW: “Bowen and Albanese will wreck the joint. It is odds on!”
WHY ARE THE LIKES of Google, Apple and in the most egregious alienating contrarian mode Microsoft “News” encouraged by government and or law enforcement authorities to run divisive polarising fake #science report and commentary, this ghastly internationally embarrassing and even humiliating tree-biting frothy-mouthed stuff like Chris Kenny’s?
He’s from Adelaide – if that helps readers to get a grip on the rich people’s #energy & Awful-@Greens Kiddie-hate headbanger frenzy, with pointy-hats, manly chest-beating and lots of whoop-whoop-whoop calls, right?
The world around now faces huge and existentially threatening #weather #systems failure, collapse, concertina-ing, erratic movement AND retardation of systems’ eastward movement AND retardation of ocean currents on their South – North/ North – South polar-towards-equator progress because of the loss of solar radiation reflecting snow and ice (albedo)
These radical disruptions to seasonal and food security include SIX major “climate” or weather-systems drivers in angry flux presently NOT simply the El Ninol/ La Nina southern anticlockwise or clockwise “oscillation” of cooler or warmer air between South America and the Western Pacific: largely obscured from public discussion behind the acronym ENSO.
As with IOD, SAM/ AO. Then last year #weather #system DRIVERS converstaion was again boosted initially among enthusiastic young USA students like Orlando Figueroa II at @RutgersU), this time by the Madden-Julien Oscillation..
In one of @figueroa_II’s tweets, 5/8/2022, he writes “There are variables in the Atlantic alone involved incuding but not limited to: Saharan Air Layer, Nino Anomalies, CONVECTIVELY -COUPLED KELVIN WAVES,* Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, Madden Julien Oscillation, Shear Tendencies, Tropical Upper Tropospheric Troughs, and more.”
These compounding and scrambling weather systems, so deeply threatening, are believed to be, on #science’s best rigorous modelling, irreversible for some 350 years
..strictly on account of excessive solar radiation heating the terrestrial and oceanic Earth calamitously exacerbated by the trapping of infrared radiation ‘bouncing’ off Earth via lost albedo-effect and wait for it, children and aged gentlefolk.. carbon gases and an array of lesser human-generated industrial gases in the atmosphere, that “thin blue band” about the Earth less tha 10 kilometres above us.
There, we’ve spelled it out yet again for the billionaires and mafia. And all of those newsmedia organisations and accountancy firms running the hazard of their prosecution in the ICJ for Crimes against Humanity within three or four years.
There are of course an unimaginably chaotic 2030 and NO 2050 in our irrefutable valid #scientific calculus.
The resulting flood rains, wildfire, dangerous storms, polar vortex and unseasonal Southern Hemisphere freeezes/ prolonged cold weather, crop & fisheries failure, hunger, starvation & food insecurity generally, new diseases in humans/ animals, birds, fish, fungi, plants, wetlands & eutrophying (no-longer-generating oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide or growing-green-foliage by photosynthesis) are ALL due to excessive solar radiation, or heat, including that trapped in the lower atmosphere, or “life-zone” troposphere, by carbon gases and unable to escape to the mid atmosphere by the ‘greenhouse effect.’
They are FLATLY not matters for polemical dispute in what may now prove to be the apocalyptic, “pluralist” or insane neoliberal trope & meme “governments mustn’t interfere with free-trade or in markets.”
Nor should we excuse the abuse of monetary and fiscal policies, from whiteboards to colour-coded charts of favoured electorates undertaken in the wildly erroneous mid 20th century belief among the political class and ruling elites of ALL liberal democratic countries that #Politics is merely the art of the possible (or the art of whatever power-holders may get away with: rife in Australian politics since 1901.
Nor can we add “whatever it takes to nail a parliamentary opposition” of course (Morrisonism 2018-22 and perhaps Keating 1993-96 at their most extreme) so “ignoring the environmental & greening movement and Electrify Everything in toto and even making international fools of ourselves by boycotting global conferences, let us greenwash “renewable”(!) natural gas in a big-budget television promotion to go to air two days after the election of 22/5/2022, let’s not say a word about electric cars, and let’s throw the Left a bit of💰for say solar panels & community batteries so they’ll shut up and we can carry on #business as usual 🔥-ing…”
The City of London’s “great game,” identified after military atrocities in Afghanistan in the mid nineteenth century, is essentially a double game: largesse or treasure offered with an ulterior nefarious motive.
In the present case of apocalyptic weather systems collapse the neoliberal hegemony’s motive is simply to render the earth unfit for human habitation by its business-as-usual conduct and exclusively for its own pecuniary profit by 2032-’35.
This Great Game as I read history has its patrician or noblesse-oblige (ancient Roman ruling class/ just look how kindly & beneficent your government is) origins in the imperial tactic to placate opposition and suppress dissent by “bearing gifts,” or advancing public funds to indigenous populations (or “Groups!”)
It is all about the present-day minimising, trivialising, deflecting and actually NONSENSISING neoliberal slogans of #adaptation & #resilience – called Capacity Building in the disastrous Harvard MPA days of 20 -25 years ago and shamelessly, even unself-consciously(!), named Retail Politics by Australian federal MP and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce.^
It is of course “greenwashing,” but NOTHING like as innocuous-sounding as virtually playing with “lighted dynamite 🧨 🧨 sticks.”
Readers who perhaps had not given a great deal of detailed thought to the hazard humanity faces at this moment in human #history will quickly figure out why we must discard “the art of the possible” for the highest-possible-priority environmental, public health & good-governance (corporate, civil/ public service & local government) responsibility.
John Blundell. Economy Ecosystems Health, Jan 19 2023
#auspol #energy #disease #health #ESG
#Independents #Greens #AustralianLaborParty
Snip
Good-governance = academic, corporate, civil/ public service and local government responsibility under the rule of just law in a well-functioning GLOBALIST Macro-economy
~ “Connectively..” – my capitals.. humour, for the love of clarity & sanity
*after the redcoats’ humiliation by revolutionary and French forces in North America 1781-3
^always for anodyne tokenistic SOCIAL ‘busy-bee’ inconsequential Activity Trap projects: THESE ARE NOT ECONOMIC, der – as if bloody not, part & parcel of an overall process of prevarication, deceit, espionage, subterfuge and propagandising – as dementing ageing denialists in positions of political power presently “fool with dynamite sticks” by placating, education & trying to schmooze the world’s real leaders and innovators on behalf of their fossil-fuels corporations donor-puppeteers, actually defeating what are inescapable societal priorities to “decarbonise” all human industry (simply to stop🔥-ing) wherever, whatever, however possible – in LESS THAN 7 YEARS
“UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult has taken the first step in the development of a new sustainable energy technology from space, securing almost £500k in funding from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) to kick-start research and development into a future Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) system, which will ultimately create a new, fully renewable baseload energy technology.”
Obscenity: The UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult has taken the first step in the development of a new sustainable energy technology from space, securing almost £500k in funding from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) to kick-start research and development into a future Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) system, which will ultimately create a new, fully renewable baseload energy technology.
Just-Make-Stuff-Up #science: Dr Mamatha Maheshwarappa, Payload Systems Lead at the UK Space Agency, said: “Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) has the exciting potential to provide sustainable energy, helping meet the government’s net-zero target and provide energy security.
Public-money burning: The total project value is £620k, funded by a £465k grant from the UK Space Agency and a further contribution from the Satellite Applications Catapult of £155k.
How the Socially & Ecologically Unreferenced Growth & Development Model Emerged in Response to the Horror & Insecurity of WWII – a Monetarist New World Order..
The German economist and banker Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1877-1970)
The historical photo is of Hjalmar Schact, who did not of course attend Bretton Woods, 1944. Forty-four allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. At that time, the world economy was very shaky, and the allied nations sought to meet to discuss and find a solution for the prevailing issues that plagued currency exchange
The following notes from the Wickipedia entry on “the Bretton Woods System..”
Other links left highlighted as they may be useful to students..
~The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.[1]
~Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The delegates deliberated from 1 to 22 July 1944, and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these accords established the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world’s gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were “branches of Wall Street”.[2] These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. According to Barry Eichengreen, the Bretton Woods system operated successfully due to three factors: “low international capital mobility, tight financial regulation, and the dominant economic and financial position of the United States and the dollar.”
~On 15 August 1971, the United States terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.[4] Shortly thereafter, many fixed currencies (such as the pound sterling) also became free-floating,[5] and the subsequent era has been characterized by floating exchange rates.[6] The end of Bretton Woods was formally ratified by the Jamaica Accords in 1976.
Here the piece referred to in this morning’s update of my swingeing critique of the capture, betrayal and lethally-dangerous-to-liberal-democracy – and liveable survivable enduring habitat worldwide – betrayal and failure of #journalism..
The clown-car that is so not funny it stands to wipe our entire put-on-a-jolly-good show-Old-Chap performative neoclassical culture ..on historical lines with fake-#science references of course
“Judgment is Me sayeth the Lord; Vengeance is Mine.”
Vengeance is Mine
I’d be glad if readers first looked at Les Robinson’s compelling article – then you might begin by counting the myriad ways we have as a race of people honed the arts of engineered disocciative trauma, depersonalisation, brutalisation even the full termination of #HumanRights as realised in effective murder or official state killing, reflecting ruefully that at the hands of hateful superstitious sexist racist ideological fascists, ALL of them fundamentalist evangelical religious, who have no understanding of constitution, law, government or society itself except as out-of-this-world, even deranged & gibbering rule of Marshall Plan USA Harvard, MIT & Chicago schools meritocracy and Cold War warriors, how it includes coheres welcomes healthy innovation and essential reform in industry and of the economic tools by which it may be successfully managed or inevitably collapses on the racist sexist hatred & otherising that were their stock-in-trade.
changeology.com Les Robinson 29/08/2017 follows with thanks..
Refugees, Aborigines, and the unemployed will change their behaviour if they are treated cruelly enough. At least that’s according to the wisdom of those who design multi-billion dollar Australian Government programs. I’d like to meet some of those people.
The latest torment-based innovation is drug-testing for welfare recipients. Absolutely no informed person thinks it will work, or is fair, or will produce anything other than greater human suffering. The head of the Australian Medical Association gave it a “Nasty star” as “mean and non-evidence-based”. Matt Noffs from the Ted Noffs Foundation wrote “This model doesn’t have heart, and certainly not brains. It is designed to punish the poor, the marginalised, for their circumstances when they need support and options.” Nadine Hazzard, clinical director at the St Vincent’s Hospital wrote “Can the government point to a single piece of evidence – here or overseas – that shows the likelihood of this succeeding? They can’t because it doesn’t exist…By definition, people with clinical disorders are unable to modify their behaviour, even in the face of negative consequences.”
Meanwhile, NSW high school students are being threatened with no HSC if they don’t achieve ‘band 8/10’ in reading, writing and maths in their standardised NAPLAN tests – which is quite a high score. A horrifying 68% of 15-16 year olds, at the most vulnerable time of their adolescence, have just been humiliated and belittled by being told to sit additional NAPLAN tests until they get the desired score. How many mental health experts were involved in that decision?
And refugees who’ve come to Australia for medical attention are about to have their miserable $100 a week survival support removed if they don’t go back to the living hell of Manus Island. Meanwhile, indigenous people aren’t even threatened, they just have their financial autonomy obliterated, via BasicsCard, irrespective of their behaviour, just because they happen to live in certain communities. They’re being punished for being, just, indigenous. How would you feel about being punished for simply being who you are?
For some reason, “Tough love” and “Cruel to be kind” are the folk remedies of preference for white, church-going, patriarchal, establishment males who are trying to control an uncompliant population. Why on earth? Is it caused by too much Old Testament, or does conservative politics somehow auto-select believers with lack of human empathy plus stupidity?
Really, even if BasicsCard or NAPLAN were good ideas, there’s no science to justify the use of threats and punishments to influence human behaviour. Behavioural science is unusually clear on this: threats and punishments cause denial, active resistance, and superficial compliance of the most reluctant and temporary kind. (For example: Elliot, B. (2003) The Psychology of Fear Appeals Revisited, http://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS030056.pdf)
If you seriously wanted to change the world (and not simply be bastards) threats, cruelty and humiliation would never be your tools of choice.
Instead you’d offer people desirable goals and then construct paths that were within their capacities, to reach those goals. All your efforts would go into creating and smoothing those paths for people. To help long-term unemployed into work, for example, you’d provide intensive counselling, support and training to help them build their capacities, as well as actually having jobs available for them (according to an authoritative 2014 study by Anglicare).
To illustrate the point clearly, let’s use hungry people and a bear to explain the difference between these two approaches.
First, a positive approach: Let’s offer people goals they value and then design pathways, that are within their capacities, to get to those goals. What’s the result?
Notice how a clear, desirable goal motivates just ONE action: towards the goal. Provided the path is follow-able, the results relatively certain, and the demands not onerous, we can be pretty sure than large numbers of people will head off, with a will, towards that goal. There are only two behavioural choices, approach the goal or do nothing, and the determining factors are the attraction of the goal and the easiness of the path.
Now, let’s see what a threat does.
Notice that a threat produces a LARGE NUMBER of possible behaviours and directions of motion, including, in this example: freeze and be eaten, act dead, hide under a rock, grab the nearest weapon and fight back, or panic and run, blindly, in any direction that doesn’t have a bear in it.
Presumably, some people will randomly head off in the ‘right’ direction, but this is almost accidental: most people will do something the program designer didn’t think would happen, or want. Most especially, they’ll use all their human wiles to avoid and resist the threat. And, in the meantime, they won’t be thinking about achieving a positive goal that betters their lives, they’ll be thinking about immediately escaping the threat.
It’s also well known that threats reduce people’s attention and brain power so they tend to make more dumb, short-term choices and less sensible choices that require long-term staying power. There’s a pile of science on this too. That’s another undesirable result of threats.
The proliferation of torment-based programs is a big lesson about the void of compassion, rationality and curiosity in conservative politics. Experience, science and empathy seem to have become inherently alien to conservative political culture. Add a predilection for cruelty and governments are continually wounding large numbers of people for little or no social gain. But those politicians and their advisors are in for a surprise: cruelty is a boomerang. The punished always find ways to punish back their punishers. There’s a pile of science on that too.
Imagine that: sunbeams, lollipops, rainbows AND unicorns.
Oh those greenie-hater Team Australia loonies of the Noughties, Anthony Albanese’s 2013 “infrastructure mates,” those frankly weird/ electrode-wired/ parallel mental-galaxy turgid skin-crawling #abc television’s “Utopia” people, those dead-creepy “On Your Side” #global#weather#systems smashers and “Resist and Denounce the ingrates, whingers & China” cookers, those failed #showbiz-, #entertainmentindustry-, #royalty-, and #popular wooden anodyne #psychology-driven vaguely-but-alas-not-convincingly-literate AI’d*** spell-checked predictively-texted Supply Siders with their Michael Somare era – or James Marape the present evangelical Christian witchcraft & street-rape guy – Papua Niugini electoral cargo cult B-a-a-a-a-r-n-by Joyce Retail Politics replete with stuff off the world’s supermarket shelves & McDonnell Douglas, Westinghouse, General Electric, Boeing and Wartsila Finland huge variously muffled loud bang-bang fuel-burning machies to fulfill all the lazy-arsed passive-consumer desires (& ??lusts) of cognitively impaired &/or congenitally deranged aspirational upper middle-income people, whose marionettes & string-puppets call all the public shots in this frankly bewildering very-very-late neoliberalism mentally-disordered Jimmy Carter era fake-Voltairean explicitly Friedmanite “defend to the death your right to incite slaughter, mass starvation, nuclear warfare.. era
..in the name of libert-aryanism, egalit-aryanism and really cool sweat-lodge tough-mudder paint-ball cross-burning adventure-island Golding’s-1954-Lord-of-the-Flies broederbond fraternity, Friedmanite/ No Judgment/ No Government-Interference-in-Markets Mediaeval Priapocracy or Phallocracy: mentally, spiritually and figuratively in vile 16th century Cromwellian stocks or dangling from jibbets*, with late #primaryschool prepubescent 1970s #psychiatry‘s object-relations, UTTERLY bereft of Piagetian full adult-capacity #concrete#operations, critical thinking, contextualising, de-literalising meanings or unpacking – or at least laughing at incongruous, discordanty or dissonant – metaphors, swept away to social irelevance and ignominy and PERMANENTLY LOCKED OUT OF THE OTHER SIDE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS~ by their belligerent machismo refusal to even accept that PTSD is a medical condition, most likely never having even heard of Bessel van der Kolk** or Pierre Janet’s 75 year-old scientific explanation of disocciation, how it actually unravels personhood and its mentally crippling effects: so indeed there these meme-, cliche-, catchcry-, 50 y-o Johnny Farnham song- & slogan-laden both-sidesist story telling confabulators and rhetoricians sit, or rather blob about, from aeroplane ride to aeroplane ride, from newsmedia conference to newsmedia conference, fiercely honouring Ken Burns’s (The Civil War, The West, 1990s) Narrative Drive and legendary balance in a supposed debating chamber – the Australian Parliament – Jesus wept – or on skynewsme, SKYTV et set era, who still to this day have THE LATE GREAT AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY IN A DEATH-GRIP.
Indeed the more I poke fun at them the more they dig their Enrich-the-rich-but-screw-the-middle-class-Josh-Frydenberg heels in, the money they are on is evidently that flash. ..Stanley Melborne Bruce 1923 – 1929 the Nationalist Party, or mad pastor Shouty 2018 – 2022, take your pick, Mick/ Michaelia.
Get rid of these fools please. Today would be the best day and it is crystal-clear from current knowledge of global geophysical terrestrial atmospheric oceanic & weather-systems functioning symbolically the ONLY day available to us. – At least if the broad political class (every household on more than $85 – 90,000 a year after-tax income) could ease up rabbiting on about syphilis & 12 year-old Pacifica girls man Cap’n James Cook Royal Navy this January that would be a start on talking things that actually matter and will determine whether the infant born today lives past 35.
I know I am like a dog with a bone but too bad, my job is to fight for human futures or I have no job, but how utterly bewildering it is that 9 of 10 adult Australians have NO IDEA of the hazard to life on earth, all life on earth (tropical thru savannah sub tropical thru temperate thru cool thru cold belts of latitude) of excessive solar radiation. Excessive UVR has been on an upcurve sice I first wrote about it in August 1994, when as the cloud aerosols started to give way to blue summer skies over Antarctica and everywhere south of say latitude 25 degrees south we some of us thought uh-oh this is ozone depletion. And since then? Almost every year ludicrous lies from government, corrupt universities and billion-dollar authorities like the AAD, BoM, CSIRO and Chief fake Scientists whose brief from #Fossilfuels corporations and organised crime cartels has been to say nothing important or even factual and has been so ever since I first heard of a ‘chief scientist’ 40-odd years ago – and he was a loquacious Australian in Pom-land being lionised by Robyn Williams the #ABC Seance Shoah dude.~~
So yes, let’s please get on with the work cut out for us and reject the utterly dysfunctional literally bloody pantomime of strategic electoral jockeying public relations performative display, ceremony, announcement, advertising promotion & ludicrous in fact lethally dangerous focus-group & consumer opinion poll government.
John Blundell, Political Leadership Australia – no Grattan, no Lowy, no ASPI, no National War Museum theme-park, no IPA, no sex-romps a la Ayn Rand Alan Greenspan Nathaniel Branden – NO SLOPPY SECONDS or indeed any men’s rapine enthusiasms – NO oil economy corrupted- and criminally irresponsible-“#science” and an immediate worldwide end to neokeynesian chat & ‘Thunberg’ blather concerning the econometric monetary billionaire cabal’s delights, interest rates, wages, rates of employment, the money supply, untenable fictive derivative credits/ offsets that have no connect whatever with reducing global meltdown hazard per excessive terrestrial solar radiation, taking ZERO acccount of public and ecological health, let alone the United Nations’ now utterly fanciful development goals’ promotions & its advertising slogan #ESG
South Australia, the rest of the country and all points beyond – we’re with you. And have never in our lives fought so hard
* A gibbet /ˈdʒɪbɪt/ is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executioner’s block, impalement stake, hanging gallows, or related scaffold). Gibbeting is the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing..
~in traditional and indigenous society as is now clear in functional operational neuroscience (that is POST-NEUROPLASTICITY neurolinguistics not the wooden bio-mechanical Alan Turing mental calculus & busy little neuronal micro-geographical centres for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, effing, effing effing, effing, emoting & obviously the joy of defecation) the other side of consciousness, or kuta ngulu in the central Australian Arrrente landguage (whoops, not) is hesitation, pondering, reflection and creative – or yes self-hazarding – ideation. Other side ideation is generated in the right cerebral hemisphere of right-handed mammals. “Right-side,” in central Australian people who’ve grown up with, or into, our old people’s language refers to the law and the material – real time, if you like.
** The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Body and Mind in the Healing of Trauma – from 30 years of work, 2014, USA
~~ lower (troposheric)-, mid-, upper atmosphere CHFC gases and at least 4 other indusrty-generated gases research AND the NASA observations of the hot air updraft of November 2019 over Antarctica exactly when Australia began to burn 24 million hectares, 3,000 homes & 3 billion animals and related complex weather system changes that probably cannot be reversed for say 350 years is incredibly sophisticated, multi-faceted and dramatically variable in different seasons at different latitudes, and – as i have noted at the commencement of this note – altitudes above Earth. Any civilisation that tries to reduce this superb research to some lunatic kiddie cartoon push-me-pull-you dialectical good-bad zero-sum game flatly condemns itself to the rubbish bin of human history
Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 