The following is taken from Noam Chomsky‘s Blog and I think has great relevance to the Australian situation as well:

The religious right has been organizing for years from the local level and on up—school boards, state representatives, pressure groups, etc. And has done so on a scale that gives some substance to Robertson’s threats to form a third party unless the Republican leadership makes statements of which he approves (and which they will then probably ignore). The progressive left is very substantial in scale, and could be far larger, including the large majority of the population, judging by highly credible public opinion studies that the press scarcely mentions, presumably because they understand that it is much too dangerous to allow people to understand that they are not alone in their views. And it has done important work. But it has not undertaken to create a viable political alternative. Maybe that’s a high priority, maybe not. But those who think it is (I agree) have to work at it every day, not just every four years, at all levels, from local on up, fielding candidates for everything from school boards to Congress and some day beyond, but also in education, organizing, working and acting on issues, etc. It is no use to show up every four years and say “vote for me” in a highly personalized extravaganza, which is what elections have become, given the severe democratic deficit in the country.

Please note I have rearranged my links.

I now have tow categories of links to blog(g)s – my friend and other general ones I like.

Most notably the Robbert Corr one which has been really sticking it to Bolt of late – a likeable sort my any stretch of the imagination.

If you have a blog that you’d like listed here drop me a line and if I like it I’ll list it (in exchange for a link of course).

I’m really into my blog at the moment.

Yasser Arafat

News broke today that Yasser Arafat is dead. My condolences to the Palestinian people. It is a very sad day indeed.

Generally when a world leader, particularly one that has been a world leader for 40 years, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize dies other world leaders attend their funerals and pay homage. Not Bush. Not Howard. Both have more or less condemned him and placed the blame on him for the failures of the ‘road map’ (which the Palestinian people had no say in the devising of.) I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but I am still disgusted.

I also have grave concerns for Palestine now as he was a great uniting force for the Palestinians.

I won’t pretend to have any idea about who will take his place and what they will be like but it is quite likely that it will have a destabilising effect and there is no doubt that the Israeli Government will exploit the situation. In addition I fear for the innocent Israelis who will certainly suffer at the hands of Palestinian militants.

Aboriginal Welfare Payments

Australian Federal Police today raided an Indigenous media organisation after it reported on leaked cabinet documents which outlined a new tougher approach to Aboriginal welfare payments.

There are two issues here. Firstly the issue of silencing decent. Not surprisingly the National Indigenous Times who were the target of this raid were particularly critical of the changes to the welfare payments so it would not be unreasonable to assume that the Howard government is doing its best to silence its critics. Can you remember the last time a ‘white’ media agency was raided like this? Certainly not in Australia (the only example I can think of is the US federal police recently ceasing the web server of IndiMedia.)

The second and bigger issue here is of course the issue of the planned changes to the welfare payments. The welfare payments will now effectively be made on a ‘reward’ basis. If you send your kids to school, you’ll receive them, if you don’t they wont. There is even talks of so called ‘smart cards’ being used to monitor spending.

It is simple. When you punish a people because of their race, that’s right, it is racist.

However what is more important now is how colonialist, benevolent and controlling it is. As I continually repeat if a community has control of its own destiny there is a marked decline in negative social indicators. How doing this is going to help these communities to gain control of their own destinies is far beyond me.

Welfare payments are a problem. It is often referred to as ‘sit money’. But this is because their culture has been systematically raped for over 200 years and these people live in two communities, white and black, and are walking a fine line between the two, often understandably exploiting both. This needs to be addressed but to take Welfare away from these people is to push them even further into poverty. You can’t kick someone out of a wheel chair, you have to teach them to walk first.

There is so much I feel I want to say here about the issues surrounding our original inhabitants but it is impossible to even scratch the surface. But I am saddened and sickened by these racist proposals but again, hardly surprised.

I’ve been going a bit over board with my blogging of late. But I just feel there is so much to say right now. Like I said earlier, the re-election of the two conservative leaders in the US and Australia (and Afghanistan?) has meant that we desperately need to step up our efforts against these war criminals as well as deepen our democracies.

On the issue of deepening democracy I have three things I’d like to point to here.

1. http://creativecommons.org/ which is a site dedicated to disseminating information available within the creative commons. I highly recommend that if you ever publish anything that it be available “on the commons”. This is at the very heart of a deep democracy and encourages creativity and a free flow of information – both things are vital to a health democracy – not the capital gains to be made from intellectually property rights. This means you Disney and you Microsoft.
2. And awesome interview with Public Enemy about how copyright killed Hip-hop at a very young age. This may also be relevant to comments made on Love and the Rough about the inability for large parts of hip-hop to be creative with regards to it’s sampling (or some such)
3. Finally (and finally) the complete version of Firefox was released today onto the creative commons. If you are viewing this in Internet Explorer I implore you to download this free and far superior internet browser which is not Microsoft and created for the people by the people with non-propriety coding.

If creative commons are necessary for a deeper democracy then the adoption of US copyright laws by Australia under our free trade agreement is surely an attack on our democratic rights and will ensure the re-election of conservative governments. These things are far from unrelated.

Just as a side note, it would appear that the only conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that teenaged abortions have increased is that abortion is therefore bad. If you take this Age Poll as an example it would appear that if you are alarmed by increased abortion rates that you therefore think abortion should be banned.

What! The issue of abortion is about a woman’s right to choose. End of story. Obviously increases in teenaged abortions are alarming (if they are as high as is stated) but if the alternative is ruining a young woman’s life then it is quite simply an open and shut case.

WHERE ARE THESE IDIOTS COMING FROM!?!

Allow me to make a controversial statement that I have no evidence to support and is based purely on my own intuition with regards to abortion.

The Age has reported that teenage abortions have soared. Of course the Victorian health minister Bronwyn Pike denies this (why the Victorian Government is getting involved in an issue that the Federal Government is bringing up is beyond me). However The Age has obtained information through the Freedom of Information Act that says that teenage abortions are up by 13% over the last decade.

Now, there has been research done that shows that suicide rates increase under conservative governments. Certainly the nineteenth century French sociologist Durkheim’s concept of ‘Anomie’ evidences this considerably with feelings of disassociation and purposelessness that came with the industrial revolution being the primary cause for an entirely new motivation for suicide which he termed ‘anomie’.

Now couple this idea with the fact that as many social epidemiologists are now showing that negative social indicators (such as dangerous drug use, unsafe sex, heart disease, high school retention rates etc) are lower in areas that their communities have control of their own destinies. Economic discrimination is not unrelated here. Nor is the idea that the Transnational Capitalist Class force on us that corporate globalisation is inevitable and out of our control.

With all this in mind I think that it is safe to say that the hard line economic policies of the Howard government and the reduction in services and ‘community’ that has accompanied this has direct implications for teenaged women engaging in dangerous sexual practices. As I have said before abortions will always be necessary and I strongly advocate the right of these women to have abortions whether the rates are increasing or otherwise. And while education will certainly help in the reduction of our abortion rate, so will a sense of belonging and control. Moreover as I have said earlier, it is men dominating this debate about Women’s bodies – not the most empowering of situations I’m sure you’d agree.

Mr Howard, you’ve a lot to answer for.

More Murdoch news.

It would appear that his move to Delaware had the added advantage of lack coporate governance laws. Is this his motivation? Probably not but I wonder what his motivation is considering, as Crikey’s Steven Mayne points out he actually lost $3.2 billion when his share price fell 14 per cent from $12.16 to $10.44 as the move was announced.

The following links I find a bit odd:

• http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http://www.outfoxed.org%2F (see near the bottom #97 on the incoming links, or at least it was at 1:30pm on Mon 8 Nov). Which lead me to:
• http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fgoonanism.blogspot.com%2F

Very strange – All you bloggers are there too:

• Walsh
• Project Maya, and again Project Maya (not sure why there are two.
• Love and the Rough and again Love and the Rough
• Commit No Nuisance

Funnily enough I see to have the most profitable blog of the lot. God bless capitalism.

Abortion

So the abortion debate continues this time with an interjection by the Governor General Michael Jeffery. There is a lot of debate around these people making political statements. This morning your friend and mine, Andrew Bolt, tried to argue that Michael Kirby should reframe from such comments but Jeffery is fine to make them – I wonder if he argued this when William Dean was GG. It is my opinion that both, in fact anyone, should be able to make such comments.

Anyway, Jeffery has argued that we can reduce the abortion rate to zero by “contraception, better education, and better understanding of relationships.” What a load of shit. Condoms break, people forget to take the pill, accidents happen. Better education is certainly important and I’d certainly like to see a reduction in abortions as it means less suffering for women – they are highly traumatic experiences and not too many people acknowledge this.

Again, I’m baffled that this has resurfaced as an issue. I thought we had realised that women have a choice. You’ll notice that it only seems to be men commenting on the issue.

A couple more interesting things:

• Roy’s acceptance speach for the Sydney Peace Prize
• An article by Greg Plast saying that Kerry won the election