BARNABY JOYCE’S LATEST MEDIA RELEASE

by Betty Luks
I’m sorry Senator Joyce, but your media releases are causing me no end of irritation. You publicly make one or two timely and sensible statements and people who are desperately seeking genuine leadership from among their ‘political representatives’ have their hopes raised for a short time only to have them dashed once again.
In your media release: ‘Vegetation Inquiry Critical of Governments Approach’, you refer to the fact that “It should be remembered that each Australian farmer feeds 150 Australians and 650 people overseas.”

Have you never asked yourself if there isn’t something wrong with a system that makes the Australian farmer feed 650 people worldwide in order to feed 150 Australians and himself and family? Do you really believe the rest of the world is so unproductive that Australian farmers have to feed so many of them?
You recognise “These people just don’t need to be saddled by the extra burden of having to bear what the Senate committee identified as economic, personal and family costs.”

I presume you are referring to financial and physical and lack of rest and recreation COSTS. - In other words, the farmers have to work longer and longer hours and continue to rape and deplete the soils for less and less financial returns. Sounds more like serfdom or financial-slavery to me. The owners of the land are really working for the banks and governments.
You say, “They still have to maintain the land and try to be productive and yet they are not being allowed to utilise the land profitably.” Good heavens Mr. Joyce, are you now saying these people – even with one and a half hands tied behind their backs through banks, governments and bureaucrats parasitically living off of them - are NOT PRODUCTIVE ENOUGH? You can’t have it both ways.

And tell me, why has the Senate Inquiry Committee come to the conclusion that “COAG should re-examine the native vegetation laws with a view to establishing a balance between managing environmental objectives and maximising agricultural production”?
COAG = Coalition of Australian Governments: Why COAG? When did the people of the Commonwealth of Australia give this unconstitutional body the authority to make such decisions on their behalf?

I feel sure, having been an accountant in a former life, you would be well aware of the terrible financial burdens these people have to bear. Don’t you ever ask yourself the question: Why is it that such productive farmers – as are Australian farmers - always struggling with such debt burdens?
Have you ever in all your life thought that there should be such a thing as a Just Price? Just as Labor and the unions once promoted the idea of a Just Wage, don’t you think that the other side of the coin should be a Just Price for free enterprise? The financial system would then simply reflect the physical facts. If that is not the true purpose of a financial system, then maybe you can tell us what is?

As for your statement: “It is interesting to note that even though the Senate has recommended a review of the laws which have created a huge amount of stress and financial hardship to farmers, the NSW government is reportedly starting a new round of clearing compliance measures which include sending satellite photos of alleged infringements to landowners. Surely the NSW government should be taking note of the inquiry findings before adding more stress and uncertainty to farmers.”

Why aren’t you ‘up in arms’ that ANY government within Australia should spy on its people by satellite? And what about that most important principle of freedom? You know the one Senator Joyce, the principle farmer Peter Spencer is fighting for - under the Rule of Law his (property) right to determine what he does with his own land – without such ‘big-brother’ 'busy-body’ government and bureaucratic intrusion, interference and parasitism.
Surely Mr. Spencer knew better than anybody else what he needed to do to ensure sustainable farming on his own land? Not good enough Senator Joyce… simply not good enough!  

THE TAIL THAT REFUSES TO WAG by Jeremy Lee On Target Vol35 No17: 

Let me remind readers of what Jeremy Lee (another Queenslander) wrote over ten years ago about the direction taken by the National Party – towards globalisation and the new world order.
Jeremy wrote: One might have thought that the National Party would have woken long ago to the need for a major push to revive the bush. Even the blind can see that rural Australia is at the tail end of a long period of decline, which started at the end of the sixties. Spaced over the quarter of a century since then has been a refugee crisis which in terms of numbers must be reaching the half-million - obviously led by the 250,000 or so farmers who have walked off the land. All this while the National Party sat on its hands - or washed them, Pilate-like, while the protracted disaster unfolded.

The National Party is now, in reality, two parties: the State-oriented section, of which the Queensland National Party is most obvious; and the "Fed-Nats", best represented by leader Tim Fischer, which has decided that its best chance of harvesting the choicest plums of politics is to tread in the footsteps of the Liberals. It was all fine until One Nation brought into public view what all but the most obtuse of politicians must have known - a seething anger and resentment in rural Australia that had finally tired of being the "bunny" for complacent party hacks who never took a stand on anything. Aware now that, whatever long-term fate befalls One Nation, the disaffected in rural Australia will continue to seek political weapons that can turn the tide, the Nationals are looking for a few alternatives to retrieve their fortunes.

Most Federal Nationals are only in office now with the barest of margins. The Australian Financial Review (30/4/99), in an intriguing full-page report, described a Sydney meeting between Kerry Packer and a number of top corporate leaders, and the "elite" of the National Party. "Kerry Packer delivered some passionate views in favour of greater government intervention to solve the woes of the bush, views that took the National Party leadership by surprise. His timing could not have come at a more critical moment as the National Party stands at the crossroads, facing fundamental decisions about its policy direction and leadership, with Fischer tipped to resign this year. "And Packer - with broad agreement from many of the senior business people at the lunch - was championing a far more radical position than the Federal Nationals dared even suggest.

"The Nationals at the meeting - Federal leader Tim Fischer, his deputy John Anderson and Party president Don MacDonald - were not surprised to hear Packer's assessment that rural Australia was falling disastrously and irrevocably behind the cities. He could have been reading from a National Party script. But what did surprise them was the extent to which Packer, with dissent from only a minority in the room, thought the Government should move to remedy the situation.
The last time the Nationals were bluntly confronted with the truth was in the mid-eighties, when Ian MacLachlan, as leader of the fledgling National Farmers' Association, gave them a tongue-lashing widely reported in the media. But MacLachlan became a party-politician, and the NFF became a "puppy-dog" establishment body, and the Nationals went back to their old ways of doing nothing - until One Nation mauled them in the Queensland State election.

The article, by Lenore Taylor, described it thus: "… Fischer has committed his nine-year leadership of the Party to helping the bush face the reality of globalisation, rather than hide from it. Anderson has been part of that push and would continue it. "But the economic and social pain caused by globalisation falling commodity prices, cuts to government services in the bush and the flight of population to the cities has translated directly into political pain for the National Party. And that political pain is translating directly into support for leadership contenders who would take a more interventionist stance on policy and be more prepared to rock the Coalition boat…"

Is it possible for a party to cleanse and reinvigorate itself? The very nature of the back stabbing ambition fostered in party politics mitigates against such a possibility. It is more likely that the best elements are forced to break away - which may yet eventuate. It is clear that the philosophy espoused by Tim Fischer and John Anderson will alienate rural Australia - or what's left of it - even further.."  

‘SHORT SELLING’ IN A SOCIAL CREDIT DISPENSATION

by Wallace Klinck
In a Social Credit dispensation money would be issued for production of real wealth and cancelled as purchasing-power at its rate of consumption.
This transcends the question of whether or not economic activity is private or public. The purpose of an economy is to provide goods and services for the consumer "as, when and where required"- or desired. These are the real things that are essential and meaningful to humans.

It is important, indeed crucial, to remember that Social Credit is a policy of Christian philosophy. As the economy provides essential and expanding material security for all individuals we can expect the service ethic once more to elevate itself above the speculative wherein exploitive attempts are made to manipulate events to one's advantage at the disadvantage of one's neighbour.

We seek a cultural regeneration. It is one thing to take risks in engaging in real economic activities and quite another to seek to prosper through the manipulation of, or speculation with, that non-material mere abstraction which we use to represent real wealth and call "money." Speculation is largely an outgrowth of fear and the economic security that Social Credit would provide would abolish fear for material sufficiency.
We will need some time to recover from the social pathology that has been induced in society by the present unstable economy through the influence of unsound financial cost-accountancy which renders our survival evermore dependent upon increasing financial debt.

An illusion of scarcity – it misrepresents reality
We have the illusion of real scarcity because of an increasing scarcity of effective consumer buying power. Social Credit would equate financial credit (the ability to deliver money as, when and where required) with real credit (the ability to deliver goods and services as, when and where required). Money should be merely a claim ticket to wealth - a financial accountancy representation of what we do. Money itself should never - for a nation - determine what we do.

To say we are short of money is as absurd as to say that we lack miles, inches, kilograms, centimetres, pounds, etc. Considered soberly, such comments should be regarded as psychotic --and that is, indeed, exactly what the existing financial system is. It misrepresents reality, and increasingly so, as we produce Abundance through the use of better tools, i.e., technology.
While we dig our way out of real scarcity we dig ourselves into an even deeper hole of an inability to access that abundance without placing an ever-growing lien upon the future. And, the nations are told by the established "experts" that we can dig ourselves out of un-repayable debt by increasing the debt - the very factor that has become our undoing in the first place.

WHAT THE PUBLIC NEEDS TO KNOW: THE GROSS NEGLIGENCE OF BP

“The Gross Negligence of BP -- Oil Giant's Trying to Slick Its Way Out of Controversy”
Source: https://www.alternet.org/story/146771/. Greg Palast’s article is well worth a read.

He writes: “I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum. That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.
What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates. That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap. (But it is not a ‘spill’ Greg, it is a ‘gush”!)

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple. But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll.
They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island. But it was all a lie.
On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.
As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun: BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?" It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?
Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies. I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.
Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end this is about the anti-regulatory mania: In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book."
It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's de-regulation committee, one Al Gore. Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "where the hell was the Government!" Why didn't the government do something to stop it?
The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rulebooks. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rulebook. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is between Dan Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Dan's my man.

*** This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews who therefore poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So it blew. Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," says Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here: the man on the platform – or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana? Source: https://www.alternet.org/story/146771/

Comment: Governments are all about letting the big boys 'off the hook' and penalising the little man.

Greg Palast’s “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” for $60.00 plus postage.
“The Anglo-American Establishment” by Carroll Quigley - $25.00 plus postage.
”Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq” by Tariq Ali - $25.00 plus postage.”  

FIRST SENATE HEARING INTO NATIVE VEGETATION LAWS

The National’s Senator for New South Wales John Williams has questioned whether environmental compliance officers have to meet targets during the first native vegetation laws Senate hearing in Wagga Wagga. Senator Williams, a member of the Finance and Public Administration References Committee, cited the case of a northern New South Wales farmer who, in the process of clearing blackberry bushes and ripping rabbit warrens, had impacted on nearby trees.

After being threatened with a heavy fine by a compliance officer from the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water, the farmer sought legal representation, and his solicitor has signed an affidavit that when he asked why his client was being pursued, the compliance officer replied "we must have so many prosecutions a year" or words to that effect. Senator Williams asked the Departmental officials at the hearing if that was the policy, but they rejected that.

He also raised the case of a North Coast farmer who wanted to convert his property, which had been running cattle for over 100 years, from perpetual lease to freehold, but then found there were caveats that wouldn't allow cattle to be run under freehold. "Perhaps most astonishing of all is the revelation from the NSW Farmers Association that in some cases where land is converted from perpetual lease to freehold, the owner cannot use any chemical to spray noxious weeds if there is a danger to surrounding native grasses. From just four hours of evidence it became clear how hamstrung farmers are, all because the State Labor Government has pandered to the Greens.
(The Nationals have ‘gone along with the flow’ for many a year Senator. When are the Nationals going to take responsibility for their own actions? …ed)  

GOLDMAN INVESTORS LINE UP FOR LAWSUITS

Source: The Independent, 5 May 2010. Goldman Sachs faces an accumulating number of lawsuits from shareholders angry at the bank's mortgage trading activities in the run-up to the credit crisis and claiming they should have been told the bank was facing a fraud investigation by regulators. Having come under fire over how much it should have disclosed about the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation ahead of the fraud charges filed last month, Goldman is giving shareholders more details than ever before of its legal quagmire. It published not only the outline of the legal claims against it but also the actual court filings by five shareholders, each of which is seeking to become a class action lawsuit that other Goldman investors can join.

Regardless of whether Goldman is found guilty of committing fraud in the complex subprime mortgage deal at the heart of the SEC's allegations, or settles the case, it must now also defend itself against accusations that it should have told investors last summer that it had received a Well's notice from the regulator. A Well's notice is a formal warning that civil charges are likely. Goldman says it had not considered the notice to be material information, and had not expected charges to be brought. It denies the SEC's allegations.

The shareholder suits against it allege "breach of fiduciary duty, corporate waste, abuse of control, mismanagement and unjust enrichment in connection with collateralised debt obligation offerings made between 2004 and 2007, and challenging the accuracy and completeness of Goldman's disclosure", it said in a regulatory filing. Shareholders will gather at Goldman's New York offices on Friday for its annual meeting, which threatens to be an explosive affair.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/goldman-investors-line-up-for-lawsuits-1962473.html

Editor’s comment: And still the public hasn’t woken up to the much more fundamental issue: Why should the private banking system have control over the nation’s financial system – and why are the politicians so subservient to the private banks?  

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF THE FRUIT IS GENETICALLY MODIFIED?

We pass this information on from one of our readers. For those who want to know just what are the origins of the fruit they eat. Note the #s on the Fruit Label - Conventional Fruit Labels = Four digits starting with 4 :
Organic Fruit Labels = Five digits and starts with number 9 :
Genetically Modified Fruits = Start with the digit 8

So next time you go shopping, remember these critical numbers and know how to avoid purchasing inorganic and GMO fruits should that be your choice. Shop Safe! This is good to know because stores aren't obligated to tell you if a fruit has been genetically modified.

So if you come across an apple in the store and it's label is 4922, it's a conventional apple grown with herbicides and harmful fertilizers. If it has a sticker 99222, it's organic and safe to eat. If it says 89222, then ... It has been genetically modified (GMO).