Saturday, 12 November 2016
Just because it is beautiful........(16)
Click on link to listen: http://www.audubon.org/sites/default/files/eathan_-_trephinagorgehollistaylor2016b-2.mp3
Friday, 11 November 2016
One Nation Leader Senator Pauline Hanson appears to be labouring under a new and rather strange delusion
One Nation Leader Senator Pauline Hanson appears to be labouring under a new and rather strange delusion – that Julian Assange is being held captive as a political prisoner in the Embassy of Ecuador in London and has been convicted of a serious criminal offence in the United States of America in absentia.
Rather oddly she fails to mention the fact that in 2012 he breached English bail conditions and this is the reason he cannot leave the embassy as he will inevitably be re-arrested due to an outstanding extradition request in relation to a Swedish investigation into rape allegations.
To date Assange has not been formally charged with any offence in Sweden or America, therefore their are no grounds for the out-going U.S. president to offer him the "presidential pardon" suggested by Hanson or the president-elect to consider doing so once he assumes office.
The current legal impasse may be getting closer to a resolution without Senator Hanson’s intervention, as Sweden’s public prosecutor’s office has confirmed that it will finally question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London sometime this week.
Productivity Commission criticized over focus of superannuation inquiry
MEDIA RELEASE
7/11/2016
Super inquiry should look to the best, not second rate, systems
The Productivity Commission should focus on the world’s best retirement income systems rather than consider inferior models in its review into default superannuation settings, warns Industry Super Australia.
The retirement income systems of Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia are currently ranked first, second and third respectively in Mercer's 2016 Global Pension Index. Yet, Chile (ranked 8) and New Zealand (no
ranking) are being held up as exemplars in the Productivity Commission’s review process.
In its submission to the review, released today, Industry Super highlights key features of the successful Danish and Dutch systems that are already evident in Australia’s high-performing industry, corporate and
public sector default funds. (See table below.)
Specifically, they are:
• Trusted providers run on a not-for-profit basis only for the benefit of members;
• Industry or multi-industry funds generally affiliated with or approved by industrial parties;
• Wholesale rather than retail in structure to leverage scale and minimise costs.
Industry Super Australia chief executive, David Whiteley, said the focus on New Zealand’s and Chile’s pension systems had set the Productivity Commission review off on the wrong foot.
“The touchstone of a world class pension system comes down to the culture and values of the providers,” said Mr Whiteley.
“The best systems– just like Australia’s best performing funds – involve employers and employee representatives working together to deliver income security for retirees. They are not about generating profits for banks and financial institutions,” he said.
“The approach to superannuation in Denmark and the Netherlands - along with the part of Australia’s system built and maintained by unions and employers - is internationally lauded.
“The key difference is that these systems and institutions put member interests above those of others, including shareholders”.
“Super is different to banking and industry super funds are deliberately different to bank super funds,” he said.
The track record of for-profit entities in superannuation systems is poor, and, in Australia, regularly dogged by scandals. In the past week it was revealed the major banks’ wealth management arms will have to pay up
to $170 million in compensation to customers who were charged for services they never received. A separate analysis conducted by Rainmaker for ISA found that retail and bank-owned super funds have gouged up to $1.8 billion in fees by delaying the transfer of accounts to cheaper MySuper products.
“Official APRA data shows the for-profit retail sector has underperformed industry super funds and other not-for-profit funds by almost 2 per cent a year on average over the last decade. The retail model has
comprehensively failed to deliver fair outcomes for members,” said Mr Whiteley.
“What separates Australia from the best systems is that we allow for-profit funds to participate, despite clear and serious conflicts of interest and an unwillingness to act on them”.
Industry Super Australia supports the role of the Fair Work Commission in determining workplace default funds.
The Productivity Commission has been tasked with developing alternative models for a formal competitive process for allocating default fund members to products. Its draft report is due in March
2017.
For further information, including a copy of the submission, contact Phil Davey 0414 867 188
Industry Super Australia provides research and advocacy on behalf of 15 not-for-profit industry funds who, in
turn, are the custodians of the retirement savings of five million Australians.
The opinions above are those of the author in their capacity as spokesperson for Industry Super Australia (ISA). ISA, the authors and all other persons involved in the preparation of this information are thereby not giving legal, financial or professional advice for individual persons or organisations. Consider your own objectives, financial situation and needs before making a decision about superannuation because they are not taken into account in this information. You should consider the Product Disclosure Statement available from individual funds before making an investment decision. Industry Super Australia Pty Ltd ABN 72 158 563 270, Corporate Authorised Representative No. 426006 of Industry Fund Services Ltd ABN 54 007 016 195 AFSL 232514
Thursday, 10 November 2016
The Bentley Effect showing at Yamba Cinema, 6.30pm Saturday 19 November 2016
After drilling fifty wells under the radar, in 2010 the CSG industry arrived unannounced, to drill an exploratory well in the peaceful Keerrong Valley in the Northern Rivers. A group of concerned neighbours investigated and alarm bells rang out across the region as the community’s immune system was triggered- the sleeping dragon was awoken.
A trickle of environmentalists and local farmers soon grew to a torrent of concerned citizens from all walks of life - business people, activists, grandmothers, teachers, musicians, nurses, local indigenous mob – and through this unlikely alliance, a wide-scale social movement was born.
Following a series of increasingly dramatic blockades, Metgasco, an unconventional gas exploration company, threw down the gauntlet. They announced their plans to commence drilling a “conventional gas” well on a farmland property in Bentley, a peaceful stretch of country, just 12 minutes’ drive from the township of Lismore.
The community’s response has now become the stuff of legends. From out of this cow paddock rose a highly organised, self-governing tent city – complete with meeting halls, kitchens, cafes, toilets, nurseries and strict codes of non-violent conduct. But with an undertaking of this scale, and in such an energy-charged environment, conflict and drama was inevitable, and there were many challenges as strong personalities clashed, cultures collided and emotional strains were pulled to breaking point.
Labelled by the government as ‘radical extremists’, these people, however, were not your usual suspects. Here at Bentley stood an army of mainly once conservative, every-day Australians uniting with their entire community to fend off the mining threat and protect their land, air and water. They felt they had no choice.
The bravest locked themselves onto cement fixtures blocking the way into the site. Each morning they gathered before dawn at ‘Gate A’ to rally together, set themselves to the tasks of the day and sing the songs that would become their protest anthems. High-profile musicians gave regular pop-up concerts to the delight of the campers, “Simmos” and day-trippers alike. Metgasco and their political supporters rallied too and a growing police force waited in Lismore for orders to break up the blockade. A daily sms message was sent out with the latest intelligence and the community showed up in droves, time and time again, to face the music. The stage was set and over 850 riot police with horses were on standby in Sydney, with orders to remove the protectors.
Told through the eyes of the protectors over a four-year period and intercut with fresh insight from some of the world’s leading social commentators, this now famous standoff at Bentley forces us to ask the question- what is truly valuable? [https://www.facebook.com/thebentleyeffectmovie]
A trickle of environmentalists and local farmers soon grew to a torrent of concerned citizens from all walks of life - business people, activists, grandmothers, teachers, musicians, nurses, local indigenous mob – and through this unlikely alliance, a wide-scale social movement was born.
Following a series of increasingly dramatic blockades, Metgasco, an unconventional gas exploration company, threw down the gauntlet. They announced their plans to commence drilling a “conventional gas” well on a farmland property in Bentley, a peaceful stretch of country, just 12 minutes’ drive from the township of Lismore.
The community’s response has now become the stuff of legends. From out of this cow paddock rose a highly organised, self-governing tent city – complete with meeting halls, kitchens, cafes, toilets, nurseries and strict codes of non-violent conduct. But with an undertaking of this scale, and in such an energy-charged environment, conflict and drama was inevitable, and there were many challenges as strong personalities clashed, cultures collided and emotional strains were pulled to breaking point.
Labelled by the government as ‘radical extremists’, these people, however, were not your usual suspects. Here at Bentley stood an army of mainly once conservative, every-day Australians uniting with their entire community to fend off the mining threat and protect their land, air and water. They felt they had no choice.
The bravest locked themselves onto cement fixtures blocking the way into the site. Each morning they gathered before dawn at ‘Gate A’ to rally together, set themselves to the tasks of the day and sing the songs that would become their protest anthems. High-profile musicians gave regular pop-up concerts to the delight of the campers, “Simmos” and day-trippers alike. Metgasco and their political supporters rallied too and a growing police force waited in Lismore for orders to break up the blockade. A daily sms message was sent out with the latest intelligence and the community showed up in droves, time and time again, to face the music. The stage was set and over 850 riot police with horses were on standby in Sydney, with orders to remove the protectors.
Told through the eyes of the protectors over a four-year period and intercut with fresh insight from some of the world’s leading social commentators, this now famous standoff at Bentley forces us to ask the question- what is truly valuable? [https://www.facebook.com/thebentleyeffectmovie]
THE BENTLEY EFFECT - one screening only
Q&A after movie
DATE: Saturday 19 November 2016
TIME: 6.30pm
TICKET COST: $20 & $10 for children under 12 years - on sale now
VENUE: Yamba Cinema
13 Coldstream St,
Yamba NSW 2464
PH: (02) 6646 3430
In U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump's own words......
 |
| The New York Times, 9 November 2016 |
On 8 November 2016 Donald J. Trump became president-elect of the United States of America by being first past the post in achieving over the required 270 Electoral College votes – achieving 279 to Clinton’s 228 votes.
In the popular vote by registered American voters Clinton gained 207,039 more votes than Trump.
Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States on 20 January 2017, a fixed date required by law.
Was Barack Hussein Obama the last president of the United States of America?
Have the American people swapped a democratically elected president for a democratically elected fascist despot?
I may not be the only person wondering…..
The New Yorker, 9 November 2016:
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998
The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world.
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.
Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his emotional support.
The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.
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