22nd of May 2011

 

 

The Honourable Julia Gillard MP,

Prime Minister of Australia,

Parliament House,

 

In September 2005, Australian disability pensioner Vincent Berg was returning home from Europe. He travelled from Rome to Frankfurt by train and boarded there a plane to Brisbane. After very long flight extended by several hours stopping in Singapore, on Friday, the 23rd of September 2005, Vincent Berg finally reached his home on the Gold Coast.

Since his childhood, Vincent Berg has never been capable of sleeping in trains, planes and public waiting places, and returned home extremely exhausted mentally and physically. His condition was a strange combination of extreme fatigue and feverishness.

Some Australian politicians and media are criticising violations of human rights in China, Cuba and elsewhere while ignoring such violations in our own country. Does not this look cynical and hypocritical?
I am concerned about civil rights in Queensland, where quite a number of people continue to call Queensland a 'police state'. In 1980s, there was a Royal Commission of Inquiry into alleged police crimes and misconduct, and police commissioner and some senior police officers were jailed for corruption. Last year, former chairman of that Commission Justice Fitzgerald publicly warned that Queensland has been again heading towards systemic corruption.

Ever since the Bush administration classified the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrorist attack on his country - it followed that the entire civilised world responded with sympathy.Bush's advisers found a new catch word to use as an opportunist tool to sell their breaches of human rights and international laws - War on Terrorism.Under this guise, they have taken the world's good faith as an opportunity to abuse Human Rights even better than Pearl Harbour because this was their mainland.The respect for the United Nations has been subject to the undermining performances of various US administrations to the extent that it has truly become a "paper tiger".

Surely it must be accepted by now that the biggest terrorist in the world is the United State of America?  Even before the horrendous G.W. Bush administration, their history has been one of chosen or opportunist wars from which they have always profited.

They have created in new Israel a mirror image of themselves by protecting that illegitimate Zionist state from all effective criticism and supplying them with the training and the latest and most deadly weapons of mass destruction that the US can devise.

They continue their terrorism with which they taunted the war weary British until the latter exhausted its mandate.  They then unilaterally declared their "state" without any agreement from the Arab owners of the land - therefore their claim was illegitimate from the start.

I know the subject of citizens initiated referenda  has been discussed before on this site. But it is important that we as fair thinking Australians keep the pressure on Governments to strengthen the democratic process.

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By George Monbiot 

The central mystery of the modern state is this. The necessary resources, both economic and political, will always be found for the purpose of terminating life. The project of preserving it will always struggle. When did you last see a soldier shaking a tin for a new rifle? Or a sponsored marathon raising money for nuclear weapons? But we must beg and cajole each other for funds whenever a hospital wants a new dialysis machine. If the money and determination expended on waging war with Iraq had been used to tackle climate change, our carbon emissions would already be in freefall. If as much money were spent on foreign aid as on fighter planes, no one would ever go hungry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTjG0aDlXvw

In a move unprecedented in American History, one local government is trying to make helping the less fortunate a criminal offence. The move emphasises the importance of the corporate dollar over the lives of people as no other laws to date could do, by denying the right of volunteers to help their follow man. The law denies the right of the charitable to feed persons whom "a reasonable ordinary person" determines may be indigent. In this writers opinion this is one step away from calling for the mandatory euthanasia of the poor.

Don't feed the homeless: new Vegas law


July 21, 2006 - 2:36PM


Trying to curb charity that is having unintended consequences, the Las Vegas City Council has made it illegal to give food to homeless people in city parks.

Residents complained that the large numbers of homeless gathering in the parks make it impossible for others to use them, said city spokesman David Riggleman.

Civil libertarians are crying discrimination.

"We're trying to empathise with both camps," he said.

"We're hoping we can improve their lives and improve the lives of people living around the park, some of whom have people urinating and defecating in front of their door."

The new law targets mobile soup kitchens, with a maximum penalty of a $US1000 ($A1300) fine and six months in jail.

Riggleman said that by shutting down such soup kitchens, homeless people will be encouraged to go to a centre or charity that offers services such as mental health evaluations or job placement.

Gail Sacco, who operates a mobile soup kitchen seven days a week, said the city doesn't have adequate homeless services and that she is undeterred.

"There's no way for people to get out to those services in triple-digit weather," she said - with the US experiencing a heatwave.

"My plan is to do anything I feel is needed to keep these people alive."

The law defines a homeless person as an indigent "whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive assistance."

American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said the language makes the law unenforceable.

"The ordinance is clearly unconstitutional and nonsensical," he said. "How are you going to know without a financial statement who's poor and who's not poor?"

"It means they can discriminate based on the way people look.".

What is sedition? Sedition is best described as taking your right away of saying the Government sucks. Most of us will remember the fun and games of Rodney Rude and the Queensland Police, how it was treated as a national joke for a few years.

The new terror laws to protect our so called national security, you could be catching a train to work talking to a friend, and if the goverment of the time has done something  you dont like,  and you speak up against it, the railway police can arrest you for sedition.

At this point you can be held indefinintely without charge.

Bird flu’s our own making and Ebola kills few,
but these nuclear weapons, their building we’ll rue.
A war on poverty, terrorism or drugs,
it’s like fighting inflation or your mates at the pub. 

There’s a threat, colour coded in chromatic red blood,
return to your bunkers, hope there’s no flood.
A natural state of Disaster? - no, it is not.

Turf warfare, a war of nerves, or a fully armed conflict,
a cold war, a just war, either way discipline gets real strict.

Terrorism and civil liberties

With an apparent rise in violent attacks against state institutions and civilian populations, governments all over the world have found an excuse to strip their citizens of long cherished personal rights and freedoms.

The sad but obvious fact of the matter is that if there are people out there who want to blow us up that much they will find a way of doing it no matter what preventative measures we take. Just look at Israel. A fully militarised state with
innumerable physical check points, unfettered military / police powers and a comprehensive range of national security / identification systems for every individual. And yet the bombers still get through – sometimes. Computer hackers who write viruses understand this intuitively - you just can’t protect yourself against every possible attack, especially when they become experts at working out the weaknesses that it has not even occurred to us actually exist yet.

I am currently reading a book titled The New Pearl Harbour - Disturbing questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, by David Ray Griffin.

The author alleges a conspiracy on the grandest scale on September 11th 2001.

Would make a great story for a Hollywood movie... if only it were just that, a story!

I am suitably disturbed.

Schapelle Corby wasn’t the only one to be sentenced by an Indonesian court on Friday. Two West Papuan independence supporters were sentenced to ten and fifteen years for “Treason against the state