BRAVO FOR THE BOLIVIANS!

by Betty Luks
One would have thought that a nation's people, that is, you, me, -- us -- considered collectively, would derive some benefits from a nation's natural resources. Surely a nation's resources are for the benefit of all? I mean really for the benefit of all!
From a Christian perspective, God didn't provide the resources just for the 'self-chosen few' -- to exploit only for their own benefit. "God sends the rain on the just and the unjust…" -- it is for the benefit of all.
Such a policy of distributing the benefits depends on neither the "left" wing nor the "right" wing of politics - neither wing has a long-term resolution. But, it can be resolved through a nation's financial system by way of financial distribution -- as is the case with the Alaskan dividend cheques sent out annually to all citizens of that state from the oil revenues.
Further Reading: The Cost of Education

One would have thought in this age of political democracy, people would give serious thought to the much more important right of the people's economic democracy -- especially in this age of technology and automation. If more and more machines have taken the place of more and more human labour (energy), isn't it time there was an equitable distribution of the products of the machines, by means other than employment or the taxes of the employed?

Giving the People the right to choose
Because our needs and choices are as varied as the number of citizens of a nation, the best way of giving the people the right to choose what they want, is through the financial system; by way of a National Dividend for each and every citizen. That is the beauty of the financial system. A money vote is a vote of personal choice.

Bolivians vote for government to exert greater control over foreign companies
According to The Australian, 20th July, 2004, the Bolivian people voted "overwhelmingly" in a "critical referendum" for their Government to exert greater control over US and other foreign gas companies. The referendum called for a 1996 law to be repealed whereby foreign energy companies were given a virtual 'carte blanche' right to exploit Bolivia's vast and virtually untapped natural gas resources. Of those who voted, 92 per cent supported a proposal for Bolivia to take back ownership of natural gas at the wellhead, meaning oil companies would be paid for pumping the fuel but would not own it.

The President of Bolivia, Carlos Mesa announced he would introduce legislation that would let Bolivia charge royalties of 50 per cent of the value of all gas exports extracted by foreign companies compared to the current 18 per cent. A closer reading of the article does reveal 42 per cent of the people stayed away after major unions called for a boycott of the referendum, but in the last resort, the people of the nation want a better deal - for themselves -- from the exploitation of the nation's natural resources.

An amalgam of labour unions, coca growers and native peoples have demanded that the President Carlos Mesa nationalise all of Bolivia's gas. They have vowed to bring the country to its knees if the wells, owned by multinationals, are not expropriated.
(If they mean by nationalise, that it is brought under centralised socialist government control of production and distribution, then this looks like another case of the "left" and the "right" coming together to keep the resources under dictatorial control -- this time "left" wing socialism. It is in fact another case of the tweedle-dumb of socialism, and the tweedle-dumber of monopoly-capitalism 'dogs', teaming up, to keep the people herded under a centralised system of control -- no matter by what name.)
Bolivia's 150 billion cubic metres of gas reserves are worth between $US70 billion (AUS$96 billion) and US$210 billion.

DIVIDEND'S FOR ALL BOLIVIANS?

A matter of distribution for 'Bolivia Unlimited'

Clifford Hugh Douglas and the productive potential:
"Unless wrecked by catastrophe the world is on the threshold of an era in which the claims upon food, clothes, housing and the amenities of civilisation must of necessity rest upon a new basis. Work, or employment, as we phrase it, is not to be in future the main claim upon these things, since the provision of universal economic employment will become quite automatically an impossibility…
The problem is not a problem of employment, and any solution which depends on the reemployment of a considerable proportion of the unemployed population in economic production must in its nature be both unscientific and unsound. It is one of distribution, and the question of employment is one which in the future, to a large extent, each individual will have to solve for himself, just as the rich man solves it.
Now, orderly distribution is almost invariably accompanied by something which can be called a ticket system. When you exchange a thin bit of paper issued by the Bank of England for a thicker bit of paper issued by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company you are only exchanging one kind of ticket for another.
The Bank of England ticket entitles you to a certain amount of any goods and services; the railway company's ticket entitles you to a certain amount and quality of transportation. So that distribution is wrapped up with this question of the right to issue and to own tickets.
When any suggestion is made to increase the quantity of money tickets, it is met by a cry of "inflation," and it is suggested that inflation and ruin are one and the same thing.

Inflation robs us all
For this reason, it is very important to understand exactly what is the correct definition of inflation, which is not an increase of money, but an increase of money accompanied by a rise of prices thus robbing everyone of a portion of his wages. Curiously enough, numbers of professional economists and bankers who stigmatised my own proposals as disguised inflation, whatever they mean by that, are now asking for undisguised inflation, with the object of raising prices.
So far as I can see, the only requirement on which insistence is made from orthodox sources at the present time in regard to inflation is that it shall be accompanied by the creation of a still further debt to the banks. However that may be, it is essential that the issue of a considerably greater amount of purchasing power should not be accompanied by an increase of prices, and should, if possible, be accompanied by a fall of prices.

The Just Price
This is quite possible, but it is necessary at the same time to see that the producer of goods does not make a loss as a result of a fall in prices, and thus become discouraged from producing. That is half of the problem, but the other half is concerned with the fact that production will increasingly be a matter of machine production, and we require to put purchasing power, or tickets, or whatever you like to call this thing that we now refer to as "money", into the hands of large numbers of people who are not in employment, and we require to do this without taking it from the people who are in employment.
We are quite familiar with the necessary mechanism for this purpose - it is the dividend system.

Further Reading "Great Britain Limited"

TORTURERS OF CHILDREN? IS THAT WHAT WE HAVE BECOME?

Asks William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, Tuesday 20 July 2004:
"The biggest story of the Iraq war is not about missing weapons of mass destruction, or about deep-cover CIA officers getting their covers blown by vengeful White House agents, or even about 896 dead American soldiers. These have been covered to one degree or another, and then summarily dismissed, by the American mainstream news media. The biggest story of the Iraq war has not enjoyed any coverage in America, though it has been exploding across the international news media for several weeks now.
The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the torture of Iraqi children.
A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz' recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centres, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report. The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of the abuse of these children.

Staff Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15 or 16-year old girl. Military police only stopped the interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A separate incident described a 16-year-old being soaked with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was also a prisoner.
Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war."
Hersh described the prison scene as, "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway," and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons have been public knowledge since the release of the Taguba Report. Recently, however, some 106 annexes to the report, previously classified, have also been released. U.S. News and World Report detailed the sum of what is contained in these annexes in an article titled: "Hell on Earth".
In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehaviour, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib." According to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.

The orders to treat prisoners in this fashion were not manufactured by the few "bad apples" we have heard about, but came from up on high.
Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and now scapegoat for the abuses, says the truth about where the orders came from would be revealed in the trials of the accused soldiers. Memos ordering the abuse of prisoners were signed off on by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Justice Department and Mr. Bush's senior legal advisor went out of their way to craft arguments justifying this, claiming that torture isn't really torture and that the President is basically above the law.

Hersh insists the American news media has an obligation to report on this situation. Photographic and videotape evidence of this torture is currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the U.S. Congress and the White House. It must be released. We invaded a country based upon the false claim that Iraq was allied with al Qaeda. We invaded a country based on the false claim that there were weapons of mass destruction which needed to be destroyed. We promised freedom and democracy, and instead installed a CIA-trained strongman named Allawi who has all but created a dictatorship in Iraq, and who has been accused of killing Iraqi prisoners by his own hand. American soldiers have died so we could do this.

We took thousands of innocent civilians off the streets in Iraq and threw them into hellhole prisons, where they were beaten, raped, and killed. This story has faded from public view because no new pictures of the abuses have come out in the last several weeks. Those pictures are out there, and they show the rape and torture of children. The international media is reporting on it.

Coalition ally Norway may be preparing to flee Iraq because of the allegations regarding these children.
Where is the American news media? (Where is the Australian news media?…ed) Where are the pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination? Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this what we have become?" (emphasis added …ed)

DID ISRAEL SET ABOUT CREATING THE AL-QAEDA MYTH?

"How Israel created the myth of Al-Qaeda", by Seymour Hersh, a New Yorker journalist. http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=42775
The following article by Seymour Hirsh is quite thought provoking. Who knows, thirty years from now when 'classified information' is released a future generation might learn the truth of the matter. In the meantime, in these days of government and media 'spin-doctoring', propaganda, outright lies, half-truths, and censorship, we report on it for the record.
It has been said that truth is stranger than fiction… has Seymour Hersh uncovered some facts, some truths, which to most would appear 'fiction'?
Could this be partly the reason why New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clarke was so angry and upset about the Israelis infiltrating her land -- and the subsequent jailing of the two Israeli spies? If they are in New Zealand, you can be doubly sure they are in Australia!

Seymour Hersh writes:
"These Israeli citizens came into Iraq disguised as Arab or Kurdish civilians, businessmen. Maybe "contractors"? Under contract with the Pentagon's neocon office? Your tax dollars at work? How much of their work is blamed on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? How much of Israel's terrorism is blamed on "Al-Qaeda"?
I have investigated the development of the "mujahideen" and here is my conclusion
In the 80s, Israel supervised the recruitment of Arab Afghan "mujahideen" supposedly to fight against Russia. They became cannon fodder and refugees before they ended up in Guantanamo. Their real purpose was to help Israel create a useful myth: Al-Qaeda! The Arab mujahideen were rather harmless as recent revelations from Guantanamo have shown. Israeli and Jewish-American intelligence specialists were trusted by the CIA -- Israelis being "allies" and experts on the Middle East -- to recruit the Arab "mujahideen" to be used by the US against Russia. Israelis disguised as Arab or Pakistani missionaries (tablighis) even ran the recruitment centres. Israelis playing Muslim missionaries (tablighis) were caught in India and Israel rushed to retrieve them.

The Arab "mujahideen" themselves were inefficient and almost useless. I have heard from the relatives of many who died in vain in clumsy incidents in Afghanistan. All the Zionists wanted was a story, a myth that would enable them to create another myth: "Al-Qaeda." The Zionists needed this myth as an excuse for their long-term plans for the "war on terror," a war to destabilze the Middle East and pit the world against Muslims.
Neither Bin Laden nor the Arab refugees he took care of were of any military significance. The Afghans themselves were the real efficient mujahideen because they knew the territory and the tribal structure. The Afghans actually saw the Arabs as nuisance. Arabs say "nothing comes out of a pot except what's in it." When the neocon liars speak about Arab/Islamic terrorism and Al-Qaeda, they are in fact talking about what they themselves are doing. They are talking about Israeli covert activities. No Arabs are involved. Israeli commandos move around using forged or stolen Arab ID's and -- if necessary -- they wear masks to hide their real identities, such as in beheading videos. Israelis continue to fake whatever it takes to prove that the "war on terror," i.e. the war on Arabs has to continue.
Listen to them more carefully. Zionists in our midst have been telling us the truth all along. Just replace "Arab" with "Israeli," replace "Al-Qaeda" with "Mossad," etc." (emphasis added…ed)

A REIGN OF TERROR -- BY ANOTHER NAME?

BASIC FUND

FURTHER CENTRALISATION CONTINUES

Karen McCann of the Ballarat Courier , 14th July 2004 reports the Local Councillors of Moorabool Shire, Victoria are reeling from the latest blow by the centralisers as they continue their policy of herding Local Councils into "regions". If some hold out hope those in Opposition will 'stem the flow' - we suggest you don't hold your breath. Council amalgamations commenced under a Liberal government - and the tightening of the noose continues under Labor. The people need a rude awakening for them to be startled into putting up some sort of fight against the centralisers.

"MOORABOOL Shire Mayor John Cutler said the shire was still coming to grips with last week's blow over the major revamp of its electoral wards. Cr Cutler said three councillors who had threatened to resign over the "debacle" were re-thinking whether they would stand at November's council elections. Cr Cutler, who had previously announced he would not stand again, said councillors had been left shocked at Local Government Minister Candy Broad's decision to green light changes proposed under a Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) review. "At this point in time everybody is taking a breath and considering their positions," he said.

Under the changes, Moorabool will move to seven councillors elected from four wards, with three single-member wards and one four-member ward. Corangamite and Pyrenees Shires have also criticised changes to their electoral wards. Cr Cutler said with four councillors representing Bacchus Marsh and three representing the remainder of the shire, councillors at the west end would face an uphill battle. "They really have to question their ability to have an impact or a say," he said.

The Victorian Local Governance Association has welcomed the review despite expressing concerns at the VEC's analysis and a failure to increase the number of councillors while the Municipal Association of Victoria has declined to comment on the outcome. Ms Broad this week ruled out a review of the Moorabool decision and defended the government's stand. Cr Cutler said he felt "disheartened and disillusioned". "I just wish that the State Government would let local government govern and get on with their business," he said.

Cr Cutler called on the government to let individual councils determine how many councillors they want. Meanwhile, an Opposition spokesman has supported the VEC for "doing its job" but criticised the State Government's actions. "If experienced local councillors are threatening to resign ... this will be disastrous because you can't buy the sort of commonsense that many councillors, who have been around for a while, bring to the sort of issues that crop up in local government," he said.
But Ms Broad said the new system would prove itself. "Whilst there is some reaction right now, we believe that in the long run this will provide a fairer electoral system," she said. Ms Broad said the government had provided an independent process for the review."

One of our prolific letter writers in the region, Ron Fischer, responded:
Dear Editor,
The remarks of the Mayor of Moorabool Shire (Cr. John Cutler) berating the State Government over electoral commission changes apply to all levels of "democracy" in this country. (The Courier July 14) It is simply dictatorship from the centre - the bigger the town the bigger the clout.
In part this clout arises from the "one vote - one value" rural people have acquiesced to over a period of decades. Federally the majority of votes are in Melbourne and Sydney, so the majority of Members come from those two cities. The majority of Ministers and Cabinet members naturally also hail from them.
Statewise, Melbourne controls us. In the Shire of Moorabool, Bacchus Marsh has the clout as Cr. Cutler points out. This problem with the shires and rural cities was foreseen at amalgamation under the Kennett (Liberal) Government when rural areas, with different needs, were lumped in with urban areas. Now the Labor Government is consolidating the Kennett initiative.
The dictatorial attitude of governments is highlighted by Candy Broad's remark, "Whilst there is some reaction right now, we believe that in the long run this will provide a fairer system."
Ron Fischer, Ballarat, Vic. 14th July, 2004.

VALE MR. TONY MAURICE

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S STATE WEEKEND

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