ANTIRACISM WITHOUT RACE IS NOT LIKE A FISH ON A BICYCLE

by James Reed
Feminists, often after a few good glasses of wine would like to mouth the old maxim that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. Presumably fish do not need bicycles, but for all we know, fish could have a secret desire to one day evolve into a creature that could ride a bicycle – like a man.

The French government is in fish and bicycle mode. According to so-called New Right thinker Alain DeBenoist (who has written two books “condemning racism”, so you know that the Establishment tolerates him, unlike say G Faye) “Antiracism without race may be quite complicated” (Occidental Observer.net, 18 August 2013). If the French government does not recognise the “existence of any alleged race,” then how can racism be objectionable, and antiracism as well, because the objects of this discourse do not exist!? This would constitute a good defence to race vilification charges.

Here in Australia the new class championing Aboriginal constitutional recognition are aware of this paradox. Part of their programme is to eliminate those sections of the Australian Constitution mentioning race, because well, it’s the new taboo four-letter word. But in doing so, the federal government will lose its power to pour billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money each year into the Aboriginal “industry”.
Hence, in the fine print, there is usually a statement that there needs to be an “Aboriginal advancement” clause put in the Constitution, or in other words, affirmative action. And that will mean, affirmative action forever.

If Australia follows the French line of political correctness, Aborigines will cease to be a “race” at all (as will all of us). The consequences of this for the politically correct, multicultural regime, will be interesting to say the least.  

EXPOSING THE FINANCIAL CORE OF THE TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS

by Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne, September 22, 2013
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored has just finished a year long study on the people on the boards of directors of the top ten asset management firms and the top ten most centralized corporations in the world. With overlaps there is a total of thirteen firms in our study: Barclays PLC, BlackRock Inc., Capital Group Companies Inc., FMR Corporation: Fidelity Worldwide Investment, AXA Group, State Street Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Legal & General Group PLC (LGIMA), Vanguard Group Inc., UBS AG, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse Group AG, and Allianz SE (Owners of PIMCO) PIMCO-Pacific Investment Management Co. The boards of directors of these firms, totalling 161 individuals. They are the financial core of the world’s Transnational Capitalist Class. Collectively, these 161 people manage $23.91 trillion in funds impacting nearly every country in the world.

The institutional arrangements within the money management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on investment, and the structural conditions for manipulations—legal or not—are always open (Libor scandal). These institutions have become “too big to fail,” their scope and interconnections pressure government regulators to shy away from criminal investigations, much less prosecutions. The result is a semi-protected class of people with increasingly vast amounts of money, seeking unlimited growth and returns, with little concern for consequences of their economic pursuits on other people, societies, cultures, and environments.

One hundred thirty-six of the 161 core members (84 percent) are male. Eighty-eight percent are whites of European descent (just nineteen are people of colour). Fifty-two percent hold graduate degrees—including thirty-seven MBAs, fourteen JDs, twenty-one PhDs, and twelve MA/MS degrees. Almost all have attended private colleges, with close to half attending the same ten universities: Harvard University (25), Oxford University (11), Stanford University (8), Cambridge University (8), University of Chicago (8), University of Cologne (6), Columbia University (5), Cornell University (4), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (3), and University of California–Berkeley (3). Forty-nine are or were CEOs, eight are or were CFOs; six had prior experience at Morgan Stanley, six at Goldman Sachs, four at Lehman Brothers, four at Swiss Re, seven at Barclays, four at Salomon Brothers, and four at Merrill Lynch.

People from twenty-two nations make up the central financial core of the Transnational Corporate Class. Seventy-three (45 percent) are from the US; twenty-seven (16 percent) Britain; fourteen France; twelve Germany; eleven Switzerland; four Singapore; three each from Austria, Belgium, and India; two each from Australia and South Africa; and one each from Brazil, Vietnam, Hong Kong/China, Qatar, the Netherlands, Zambia, Taiwan, Kuwait, Mexico, and Colombia. They mostly live in or near a number of the world’s great cities: New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Munich.

Members of the financial core take active parts in global policy groups and government. Five of the thirteen corporations have directors as advisors or former employees of the International Monetary Fund. Six of the thirteen firms have directors who have worked at or served as advisors to the World Bank. Five of the thirteen firms hold corporate membership in the Council on Foreign Relations in the US. Seven of the firms sent nineteen directors to attend the World Economic Forum in February 2013. Seven of the directors have served or currently serve on a Federal Reserve board, both regionally and nationally in the US. Six of the financial core serve on the Business Roundtable in the US. Several directors have had direct experience with the financial ministries of European Union countries and the G20.
Almost all of the 161 individuals serve in some advisory capacity for various regulatory organizations, finance ministries, universities, and national or international policy-planning bodies.

Estimates are that the total world’s wealth is close to $200 trillion, with the US and European elites holding approximately 63 percent of that total; meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less than 2 percent of global wealth. The World Bank reports that, 1.29 billion people were living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and 1.2 billion more were living on less than $2.00 a day. Thirty-five thousand people, mostly young children, die every day from malnutrition. While millions suffer, a transnational financial elite seeks returns on trillions of dollars that speculate on the rising costs of food, commodities, land, and other life sustaining items for the primary purpose of financial gain.

They do this in cooperation with each other in a global system of transnational corporate power and control and as such constitute the financial core of an international corporate capitalist class.
Western governments and international policy bodies serve the interests of this financial core of the Transnational Corporate Class. Wars are initiated to protect their interests. International treaties, and policy agreements are arranged to promote their success.
Power elites serve to promote the free flow of global capital for investment anywhere that returns are possible. Identifying the people with such power and influence is an important part of democratic movements seeking to protect our commons so that all humans might share and prosper. (emphasis added…ed)
The full, detailed list is online at: https://www.projectcensored.org/exposing-financial-core-transnational-%E2%80%A8capitalist-class/ and in Censored 2014 from Seven Stories Press.
* Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and president of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored.
* Brady Osborne is a senior level research associate at Sonoma State University.   Read further....

LET’S DISCUSS KICKBACKS OVER LUNCH…

The Independent 26 September 2013: 'Let's discuss kickbacks over lunch':
Tory donor's firm fined £55m over Libor fixing by James Moore and Oliver Wright. “Traders' emails reveal shocking conspiracy at Icap, the financial company owned by former Conservative treasurer and prominent party donor Michael Spencer - now bankers face 30 years in jail.

One of the Conservatives’ most powerful and generous donors is at the centre of a political and financial storm after City watchdogs savaged his firm for its role in the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal. Icap, the company founded by the former Tory treasurer Michael Spencer, has been fined a total of £55m by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic – £14m in Britain and £41m in the US – while three former employees responsible for the misconduct have been charged in New York with conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud. The New Zealand national Darrell Read and Britons Daniel Wilkinson and Colin Goodman face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

The news is particularly uncomfortable for the Conservatives as it emerged on the same day that George Osborne announced he had launched a legal challenge against the European Union’s planned cap on bankers’ bonuses. The Labour leader Ed Miliband sought to draw a distinction this week between his party as a champion of ordinary people, and the Tories as the friends of the rich and powerful…” Read further...

THE COMMON WEALTH OF THE PEOPLE

The following is taken from Michael Lane’s booklet “Charles Ferguson: Herald of Social Credit” and is in response to the previous article which exposes the elite’s continual centralisation of power through the control of financial credit. In his Introduction to Michael’s wonderful booklet, New Zealander Bill Daly wrote:
“Our future world will not be determined by any trend, but by what we ourselves do now as free and creative human beings. By his discovery and recovery of Charles Ferguson’s contribution to society, and his penetrating comments on Ferguson’s writing, Michael Lane has rendered all of us an invaluable service…”

Charles Ferguson was the first to coin the term ‘social credit’. Michael writes:
“Wrestling with nature to achieve a better and more beautiful living — which is real credit — is the hard part. Creating the financial instruments of this credit is the easy part. University, political primary, industrial organization, church, credit centre — these ideas have been artificially and falsely separated. But they are inseparable. Ferguson’s terminology fluctuates because he is trying to get us to associate things that we will dissociate. He wants us to visualize a modern institution that is all of these (as was the cathedral church in the Middle Ages) not because it is complex but because they are simplex.

The Cultural Heritage
Ferguson has a very clear idea of the cultural heritage (which is the artistic-scientific estate) and its sectioning off and aggrandizement by means of credit. A society’s industrial power, he says, consists of :- “its artistic and scientific capabilities. This is the chief hereditament of civilization; it consists of a precious complex of talents bred into a race. It is an intellectual estate in which every member of society has equitably an undivided interest. This estate in the solid things of the mind is by rights a good half of the common wealth of the people. And [every man] should be a sharer in the usufruct of this invaluable transmitted and accumulated power….
The root of social iniquity is in the embezzlement from the mass of the people of their right and interest in the artistic and scientific competencies —- the intellectual estate that has accumulated in the race. The new power of which Napoleon spoke was the control of this kingdom of effectual ideas by industrial magnates acting in their own private interest. Their method was the monopoly of commercial credit…

The age which began with the French Revolution, and is now coming to its end, has been, in its most striking characteristic, the age of the private ownership of knowledge. Men have bought and sold each other’s brains, wrestling for the control of the artistic-scientific social estate — society’s power to create values — exactly as the great feudalists of the former age battled for the possession of the land. To the land-lords succeeded the brain-lords, the masters of all the intellectual heritage of civilization, with power to turn the people out of these commons and fence them in… (The University Militant 1911)

The immense accumulation of stocks, bonds and various debentures that show how great the displacement of industrial control from the hands of the competent, and how grievously the efficiency of the working process has been impaired — is exhibited with pride by the commercial statisticians as evidence of prosperity and social wealth…” (The Great News 1915)

• “Charles Ferguson: Herald of Social Credit” Price $9.00 + postage
• “Human Ecology: and Social Credit” by Michael Lane $7.00 + postage Heritage Bookshop Services and/or Veritas Online)  

RISING PUBLIC FINANCIAL DEBT

by Wallace Klinck, Canada

Public debt must, under present flawed financial rules, continue to increase because the price-system itself is increasingly unbalanced; that is, it produces financial costs and prices at a rate which increasingly exceeds that of the incomes it generates. Because this imbalance is primarily due to the growing component of charges in respect of capital, it grows with the exponential increase of allocated capital charges in price relative to income generating costs, i.e., wages, salaries and dividends.

(Anyone who has watched the film version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1850s novel “North and South” can see the ‘problem’ being acted out. It was referred to in this edition of The New Times Survey, “Financial Crisis: Catastrophe or Opportunity?”

Ironically, the more we modernize our economy to replace labour with technology the larger the deficiency of income becomes. The government is forced to compensate for this deficiency by the creation of new money which it spends into the economy for public works and services, including War, etc., in order to maintain sufficient demand to keep the wheels of industry moving and to employ those who have become redundant due to the growing, and entirely rational and desirable, use of more efficient non-labour factors of production.

Consumers also are compelled to rely increasingly on bank loans as their earned incomes become ever less able to equate with the total financial prices of goods and services. Banks, whether central or private, are the source of virtually all money, which, according to existing practice is issued only as repayable debt.

An attempt to repay all outstanding debt would quickly extinguish all money in existence. Thus, we see that the price-system is fundamentally non-self-liquidating and increasingly incapable of generating sufficient financial income by which to cancel or liquidate the financial costs of production. They can only be liquidated by an expanding draft upon future incomes and this draft is in the form of growing financial debt to the banking institutions. The above argument obtains because of a fundamental error in cost-accountancy prior to, and without any reference to, interest whatsoever.

The whole absurd talk of balanced budgets is pure nonsense which attempts to postulate a mathematical impossibility. (Assuming that society does not have a collective desire to commit suicide.) These people seem to be quite impervious and oblivious to the argument adduced above and miss altogether the central issue involved. That issue is the ownership of credit. Does it properly reside with the banks in issuing it against the wealth of society or does it belong to society, i.e, the community, in general? C. H. Douglas made clear that it belongs not to the banks as mere bookkeepers monetizing the nation's wealth but to the community at large.

The major issue is not who issues credit but rather to whom does it belong.
The claim of ownership of the communal credit must be wrested from the banking institutions and restored to the community. The appropriate method, advocated by Social Credit, of doing this is not to centralize the tremendous power of credit in the hands of the Omnipotent State, but to decentralize its ownership by conferring upon all citizens a beneficial share in it - by means of a debt-free issue of consumer credit to replace and nullify the current accelerating accumulation of un-repayable financial debt.

This new effective consumer purchasing-power should be issued in the form of direct National (Consumer) Dividends and payments to retailers on condition that they lower their prices, i.e., to establish increasingly Compensated Prices. Primarily, the build-up of public debt merely represents the deficiency of purchasing-power created by collection of non- income-generating allocated charges in respect of real capital through consumer prices and their premature cancellation by repayment of bank loans or placement to capital reserve, etc.

No provision is currently made to credit the consumer with the financial equivalent of capital appreciation as against the charges made for capital depreciation. We have an absurd financial representation that suggests we are consuming our real capital, i.e., plant and tools, etc. at the rate we are producing it.

There is no debt in nature--which we are told abhors a vacuum.
All existing public debt claims belong to society at large and should be converted from a liability to an asset from which payment of the required new consumer credits can be made. This involves an appropriately constructed National Credit Account--a task properly assigned to qualified actuaries.

We do not need to place the enormous power of credit-issue in the hands of the State. There is no need to burn down the piggery to get roast pork. The best way to slay the "Usury" dragon is to render it irrelevant and the concepts of the Unearned Increment of Association and Cultural Inheritance are pivotal to this process.

Note: My conversation with a Banker
Wally: When you issue these loans to borrowers you create the money out of nothing, don't you? Banker: (with slight hesitation) Yes, that is true.
Wally: And you say that you own the credit you issue--correct? Banker: Yes that is correct.
Wally: You must because you want it paid back. Banker: Yes. Wally: And you want interest paid on the outstanding principal--another claim of ownership. Right? Banker: Yes, that is correct.
Wally: And furthermore, if we should …………… Banker: (anticipating my next words) Yes, if you default on your loan we will foreclose on your assets.
Wally: Did you create those assets? Banker: (perceptively at unease) No, we did not.
Wally: Do you return these foreclosed assets to the Community? Banker: Dead silence with a look of apprehension tantamount to impending doom. Well, almost.  

THE TYRANNY AND SICKNESS OF LAW

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
A recent article “Firms Exploiting Young Lawyers: Judge” (The Australian 13 September 2013 p.25) details the extent of exploitation of young lawyers. Many have to work late into the night – sometimes all night – just to keep their jobs. The sensible ones just throw it all in and find better working conditions in the corporate world. Good for them.

It doesn’t end there but starts at university with law school. Mental illness, especially depression is common. Studies of Australian universities have indicated that over one in five students will have mental issues per year. About a quarter of these students will not obtain help but will suffer in silence, probably failing or doing poorly in their studies. Law students head the list of students likely to be suffering a mental health issue, primarily depression. Studying law, is indeed, I believe a profoundly depressing experience.

I am not surprised to learn the above. Law is about competition and essentially warfare so it stands to reason that the whole system will be full of the same sort of misery. The Wellbeing in Law Foundation is an excellent first step to raise awareness about this problem.

However, old cynic that I am, I see the problem of misery as intrinsic to Law, which is concerned with dealing with the problems of this System. As the System is completely dehumanised and resembles a giant machine – like a meat grinder – how can Law ultimately be any different?  

PATRIARCH SPEAKS ABOUT CHRISTIANS IN SYRIA

by Hilary White: Source: LifeSiteNews.com 23 September 2013.
The head of the Maronite Catholic Church has accused the West of deliberately fomenting sectarian unrest in the Middle East for economic reasons and at the expense of millions of Christians.
Speaking from Lebanon, where thousands of Syrians have fled the conflict in their country, Patriarch Cardinal Mar Bechara Boutros al-Rai, the Maronite (Lebanese Catholic) Patriarch of Antioch, went so far as to say that there is a plot originating in the West to destroy the Middle East.
The patriarch told Vatican Radio of his fears of a plan to destroy the Arab world for what he said were “political and economic interests,” saying he had already written to the pope twice warning of this.

The West, for reasons of economics, have contributed to the “wars without end” in the Middle East “by giving billions of dollars to the [Egyptian] Muslim Brotherhood, so that they could get into power.” He added that in such conflicts in the Middle East, it is always the indigenous Christian populations who suffer most, “as if they were always the scapegoat.”
“As always, when there is chaos or war, Muslims in general attack Christians, they use them as scapegoats. I am sorry, but in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood were the ones to attack Coptic churches – and Copts as well. Unfortunately this is the mentality of certain Muslims: every time there is a situation of chaos, Christians are attacked without even knowing why.”
“There is a plan to intensify inter-confessional conflict in the Muslim world, between Sunnis and Shi'ites,” he told Vatican Radio this week. “Unfortunately this is a policy that comes from abroad. There are countries, especially Western ones but also Eastern ones, that are fomenting these conflicts.”

Cardinal Rai told Vatican Radio that the Christian presence in the Middle East has created what stability there is. “Thanks to the presence of us Christians and our daily life in all these Arab countries, he said, “we have created a certain moderation in the Muslim world,” the cardinal said.
“We Christians,” Rai said, “have been living alongside Muslims for 1,400 years, and we have spread the human and moral values of multi-confessionality, plurality, and modernity in these lands.”

Now, however, they are seeing “the total destruction of everything that Christians have built over the past 1,400 years.” “In Iraq, out of a million-and-a-half Christians, we have lost one million without hearing a word from the international community,” he added.

Distorted Idea of ‘Progress’ From Its Distorted Idea of Man
At the core of the crisis in the Middle East is the “grave moral and economic crisis” of the West. Its “distorted idea of progress” stems from its “distorted view of man,” a highly placed Catholic prelate in Egypt has said. Monsingor Giuseppe Nazzaro, the Episcopal Vicar for the area of upper Egypt and Cairo and former Vicar Apostolic of Aleppo told the Italian paper La Perfetta Letizia that everything that is happening in Syria “comes from the inability to understand that peace is not achieved with war.”  

Inside Jerusalem's Orthodox Patriarchate, Archbishop Theodosios (Atallah Hanna) of Sebastia, also referred to the “supporters” of the “ruthless terrorists” seeking to destabilize the Middle East. He said that there are those who want to bring Syria and the whole Middle East back to an era of ignorance, a new “dark ages.”
The same groups setting fire to churches in Egypt are the ones who “want to destroy Syria.” These “enemies of Syria,” he said aim at destroying the Arab communities and “national unity, and fraternity, and religious values.”

AN INTERESTING ‘TAKE’ ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Here is an interesting take on Climate Change obviously written before Rudd lost! This seems to collate with a weekend report that the eminent Climate authority has admitted that their computer models on climate change are woefully incorrect and there has been no increase in average global temperature in 15 years. The Antarctic ice shelf has unexpectedly increased by a considerable 15 %. The eminent scientists would of course not admit that their models were so wrong and there was actually a cooling in this period. Perhaps that cooling explains the extra ice in Antarctic.

Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published 130 scientific papers, six books and edited the Encyclopaedia of Geology.

PLIMER: "Okay, here's the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland
Since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just four days, negated every single effort you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet - all of you. Of course, you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress - it’s that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life.

I know....it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up until midnight to finish your kids "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs.... well, all those things you have done.... Have all gone down the tube in just four days.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just four days - yes, four days - by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time – every day. [70% of all volcanoes are beneath the sea.]

I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth. Yes, folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over - one year - think about it.

Of course, I shouldn't spoil this 'touchy-feely tree-hugging' moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, that keeps happening, despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change. And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year. Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus 'human-caused' climate-change scenario.

Hey, isn’t it interesting how they don’t mention 'Global Warming' anymore, but just 'Climate Change' - you know why? It’s because the planet has cooled by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming b*** artists got caught with their pants down. And, just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme - that whopping new tax - imposed on you that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. [That tax, plus the miners tax, was just to pay for the colossal financial blunders this Labor government has made. And now, who in their right mind, would want to win an election to put that right?...]

It won’t stop any volcanoes from erupting, that’s for sure. But, hey, relax...... and have a nice day!"   (emphasis added ..ed)

ADELAIDE MISOGYNISTS BEWARE: HERE COMES PROFESSOR GILLARD!

by James Reed
South Australia universities are sliding down the slippery pole of the QS World University rankings; the University of Adelaide sliding down two notches from 102 in 2012 to 104 today. The University of South Australia drops from 293 to 341 and Flinders University falls from 341 to 431. Exciting stuff. (The Advertiser 11 September 2013) At least it might deter some international students (=Asians) from going Adelaide’s way.

But fear not Adelaide – Julia Gillard is homeward bound, taking up a professorship in politics at the University of Adelaide. And what an exciting course it will be. Will Julia beef up on post-modern feminism? Will she get a PhD? – today people wanting to be lecturers, let alone professors need a PhD, but I guess Julia has equivalent experience in the rough ‘n’ tumble of politics. I mean, what she did to Big Kev must be worth a degree or two.

INTENDED VACCINATION COERCION: ATTACK ON SINGLE MOTHERS?

by Vera West
I hadn’t caught up with this one till seeing a letter about it (The Australian 20 August 2013): did you know the Labor Party had plans to take away welfare payments from families that didn’t vaccinate their children? Along with this was the threat of denying school enrolment. The enrolment argument is crazy, alleging that unvaccinated children threatened vaccinated ones. How, precisely, is never detailed – because the vaccinated children have immunity, don’t they?

The letter-writing mother revealed she had two vaccine-damaged children and two unvaccinated healthy children. There is much published countering Big Pharma literature, about the alleged danger of vaccinations. I am an older woman with no health qualifications, so I can’t give my opinion on this. But, I do know that it is a fact that some children have been damaged by some vaccines. I don’t know how, but given the truth of this, even if the probability is extremely low, people should have the right to decide: vaccinate or not vaccinate.

Targeting welfare recipients is really a way of targeting single mums. I am no feminist – which means that I am pro-women, not pro-communism (feminism = communism is a sound equation in my opinion). Attacking single mothers is a disgraceful act and Labor’s cutting of their welfare benefits (criticised by only one leading feminist that I have seen) was among the worst policies they advocated.

If Labor had won the election and put this policy in place, it would have deserved a High Court challenge as being inconsistent with anti-discrimination law alone. While plenty of lawyers jump up to defend the illegals, how many would have stepped up to defend single mothers?  

IN DEFENCE OF POETRY PLAGIARISM

by James Reed
Australian poet Andrew Slattery’s career is in tatters after it has been shown that he had taken lines from other poets and inserted them in his own poems. (The Australian 13 September 2013 p.3) Slattery has used lines from Sylvia Path and even Fredrick Nietzsche. He is quoted as saying that he accepts that this was wrong, but he said that collage poetry has a long tradition. Critics have said that the “mash up” defence does not hold because “centos” material is usually marked.

Now I am cynical enough to defend this just for the sake of making a comment about modern literature. Given the post modern philosophy that authors don’t exist (Derrida), and that all that exists are texts, how can this textual being “Andrew Slattery”, who doesn’t exist, plagiarise anything? How can anything be plagiarised when all that exists is just words, words, and more words? I, for one don’t know. But I do know that if post modern nihilism is swallowed, then along with reflux, plagiarism is nothing to worry about.