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Read or Condemn Yourself to Death by Ignorance

The newsletter for those prepared to look and see what is there.

No place for those who blindly bow

to the unholy alter of tyrannical authority.

Wednesday 15th August 2018


G’day,

Here is a sampling of all that crossed my digital desk over the last week.

I hope you get something from it!

Beat the drought: build Bradfield

Privacy Alert

Censorship

Two Countries’ Shame

Port Arthur

Bank Robbery

Too Lazy To Look

Break Up The Banks

Cheers!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Beat the drought: build Bradfield
 
Bradfield Irrigation Scheme
 
 
 

It really gets my goat that the people we have elected to provide leadership are doing far from a good job at it! Here is a plan that was tabled DECADES ago that would provide incalculable benefit yet the powers that be engage in petty and not so petty scams and outrages, altered priorities and destructive actions!

THERE are renewed calls for the Bradfield Scheme to be developed as a way for Australia to mitigate future droughts and to help meet its future obligations as a food supplier to the world.

The massive agricultural scheme first proposed in 1938 aims to irrigate a staggering 1000 million hectares of land across Queensland and South Australia.

The calls follow the Queensland Government’s announcement that it would develop a memorandum of understanding (MOU) as “a transparent and comprehensive assessment pathway” for the proposed $1.98 billion Etheridge Integrated Agriculture Project in the Gilbert River catchment near Georgetown.

The Integrated Food and Energy Development (IFED) project is expected to include the development of sugar and guar industries in addition to cattle, meat processing and aquaculture over 50,000 hectares.

The much larger Bradfield scheme was envisaged by Dr John Bradfield, a Queensland-born civil engineer, who also designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane’s Story Bridge.

The scheme would divert water from the Tully, the Herbert and the Burdekin Rivers, across the Great Dividing Range into the Flinders and then the Thomson River. The water would flow to eventually fill Lake Eyre.

Townsville based industry identity Tim McHugh, from livestock and property agency Hogan and McHugh, said Australia should revisit the long planned Bradfield Scheme as a way of positioning Australia as a major, and more importantly, reliable food supplier regardless of seasonal extremes.

“We are now in the worst drought I think that Australia has ever experienced, certainly in the lifetimes of the people who would directly benefit from Bradfield being developed,” Mr McHugh said.

“Bradfield remains the greatest agricultural project Australia could ever hope for and would impact across all of agriculture and the economies of the regions.

“The economic activity for all of Australia would be fantastic. It would allow the use and further development of existing infrastructure and result in new infrastructure and we really would be far better placed to be a food supplier to the world.”

Although officially abandoned in 1947 because of discrepancies in both claimed water flows and topography, the still popular Bradfield Scheme is regularly promoted. Advocates include Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, and former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, who proposed a reduced scale version of the scheme.

Under the Etheridge Integrated Agriculture Project water would be diverted from the Einasleigh and Etheridge rivers into two artificial off-stream lakes and channelled to pumping stations which supply irrigation.

The project is expected to create more than 1700 jobs during construction and more than 1000 jobs during operation.

Substantial numbers of those jobs are expected to be made available to local Indigenous people.

 
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Privacy Alert
 
 
 
 

Interesting Warning Ancestry.com gets to use or distribute your DNA for any research or commercial purpose it decides , ( for Ever ! ) any where in the World and with any Technology that exists , or will ever be Invented . . . Ancestry.com own and can exploit your Genetic Information ( DNA Coding -- You ) , for Ever !!!

 
 
 
 
Google, Facebook Censor Alex Jones
 
 
 
 

In case you did not hear, Alex Jones runs a site called infowars.com. He has a very “conspiracy theory” viewpoint. I personally find him a bit “over the top” but apparently a few others labelled him a lot more severely so had him blacklisted.

My take on that is this.

All of us are natively equipped with a personal censor that we use to filter out information that does not align with what we believe to be true or that which we find unconscionable or objectionable. Last time I checked, mine was still working. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the US Constitution do not abrogate this right to a government to a corporation. For good reason. History shows they are not to be trusted. Each has a vested interest. For instance, just this last week, Monsanto were just ordered to pay over $200 million to a person who contracted cancer by using Roundup, their herbicide. Since 1981 they kept secret that it caused cancer.

Any government, corporation or individual seeking to censor information for another has a reason to do so. All of these people are going to claim they are righteous and moral doing it for the benefit of society. Someone with crimes to hide is NEVER going to come out and say, “I want to hide my crimes so we will just censor these people so they can’t talk about them.” They talk in righteous tones about “truth” and “protecting others” so we will agree to hide their crimes.

Rather than censoring by decree, how about we promote the intelligence and rationality of the individual so we can better trust them to abandon the hate speakers like politicians who clamour for war or the racists or the religious bigots so the few misguided people of this ilk spend their time talking to empty seats?

 
 
 
 
Two Countries’ Shame
 
Florence Owens Thompson and Charlie Phillott
 
 
 

Dr David Pascoe BVSc PhD OVH - 15 December 2014

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE:

Dear Men and Women of Australia,

There are two photographs on this page, and they almost look like father and daughter. One is of a young woman, the other is of an elderly man.

The photograph of the woman was taken in the Great Depression of 1934. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, a 32 year old mother of seven children who was sitting homeless in a tent. The photograph was published in the newspapers of America and it enraged the nation, because people could not believe that Americans could be treated in such a way. It forced President Roosevelt to act, to step up and become a leader for his times: he launched soup kitchens, work gangs, programs for the homeless, dams and roads and railways were built – and he gave his people hope.

John Steinbeck later wrote a book called The Grapes of Wrath which became an American literary Icon. It was about a drought that made the farmers penniless – and how the banks had forced them off their land so they could sell it on o the big corporations. What happened to the farmers of Oklahoma carved a deep and shameful scar across the American identity that was felt throughout the Twentieth Century.

The second photograph on this page is of Charlie Phillott, 87, an elderly farmer from Carisbrooke Station at Winton. He has owned his station since 1960, nurtured it and loved it. He is a grand old gentleman, one of the much loved fathers of his community.

Not so long ago, the ANZ bank came and threw him off his station because the drought had devalued his land and they told him he was considered an unviable risk. Yet he has never once missed a single mortgage payment.

Today, Charlie Phillott, Grand Old Man of the West, is living like a hunted down refugee in Winton, shocked and humiliated and penniless. And most of all, Charlie Phillott is ashamed, because as a member of the Great Generation - those fine and decent and ethical men and women who built this country – he believes that what happened to him was somehow his own fault. And the ANZ Bank certainly made sure they made him feel like that.

Last Friday my wife Heather and I flew up with Alan Jones to attend the Farmers Last Stand drought and debt meeting. And after what I saw being done to our own people, I have never been more ashamed to be Australian in my life.

What is happening out there is little more than corporate terrorism: our own Australian people are being bullied, threatened and abused by both banks and mining companies until they are forced off their own land.

So we must ask: is this simply to move the people off their land and free up it up for mining by foreign mining companies or make suddenly newly empty farms available for purchase by Chinese buyers? As outrageous as it might seem, all the evidence flooding in seems to suggest that this is exactly what is going on.

What is the role of Government in all of this? Why have both the State and Federal Government stood back and allowed such a dreadful travesty to happen to our own people? Where was Campbell Newman on this issue? Where was Prime Minister Abbott? The answer is nowhere to be seen.

For the last few months, The Prime Minister has warned against the threats of terrorism to our nation. We have been alerted to ISIS and its clear and present danger to the Australian people.

Abbott has despatched Australian military forces into the Middle East in an effort to destroy this threat to our own safety and security. This mobilization of our military forces has come at a massive expense to the average Australian taxpayer which the Prime Minister estimates to be around half a billion dollars each year.

We are told that terrorism is dangerous not only because of the threat to human life but also because it displaces populations and creates the tragedy and massive human cost of refugees.

Yet not one single newspaper or politician in this land has exposed the fact that the worst form of terrorism that is happening right now is going on inside the very heartland of our own nation as banks and foreign mining companies are deliberately forcing our own Australian farmers off the land.

What we saw in the main hall of the Winton Shire Council on Friday simply defied all description: a room filled with hundreds of broken and battered refugees from our own country. And all over the inland of both Queensland and NSW, there is nothing but social and financial carnage on a scale never before witnessed in this nation.

It was 41 degrees when we touched down at the Winton airport, and when you fly in low over this landscape it is simply Apocalyptic: there has not been a drop of rain in Winton for two years and there is not a sheep, a cow, a kangaroo, an emu or a bird in sight. Even the trees in the very belly of the creeks are dying.

There is little doubt that this is a natural disaster of incredible magnitude – and yet nobody – neither state nor the federal government - is willing to declare it as such.

The suicide rate has now reached such epic proportions right across the inland: not just the farmer who takes the walk “up the paddock” and does away with himself but also their children and their wives. Once again, it has barely been covered by the media, a dreadful masquerade that has assisted by the reticence and shame of honourable farming families caught in these tragic situations.

My wife is one of the toughest women I know. Her family went into North West of Queensland as pioneers one hundred years ago: this is her blood country and these are her people. Yet when she stood up to speak to this crowd on Friday she broke down: she told me later that when she looked into the eyes of her own people, what she saw was enough to break her heart

And yet not one of us knew it was this bad, this much of a national tragedy. The truth is that these days, the Australian media basically doesn’t give a damn. They have been muzzled and shut down by governments and foreign mining companies to the extent that they are no longer willing to write the real story. So the responsibility is now left to people like us, to social media – and you, the Australian people.

And so the banks have been free to play their games and completely terrorise these people at their leisure. The drought has devalued the land and the banks have seen their opportunity to strike. It was exactly the excuse that they needed to clean up and make a fortune, because once the rains come – as they always do – this land will be worth four to ten times the price.

In fact, when farmers have asked for the payout figures, the banks have been either deeply reluctant or not capable of providing the mortgage trail because they have on-sold the mortgage - just like sub-prime agriculture.

This problem isn’t simply happening in Winton, but rather right across the entire inland across Queensland and NSW. The banks have been bringing in the police to evict Australian famers and their families from their farms, many of them multigenerational. One farmer matter of factly told us it took “oh, about 7 police” to evict him from his first farm and “maybe about twelve” to evict him from his second farm which had been in his family for many generations. You think they are kidding you. Then you see the expression in their eyes.

And there was something far worse in the room on Friday: the fear of speaking out against the banks: when we asked people to tell us who had done this to them, they would immediately start to shake and cry and look away: They have been silenced to protect the good corporate image of their tormentors called the banks. What in God’s name have the bastard banks been allowed to do to our people?

This is a travesty against the rights and the human dignity of every Australian

So it’s only fair that we start to name a few of major banks involved: The ANZ is a major culprit (and they made $7 billion profit last year). Then there is Rabo, which is now owned by Westpac (who paid CEO Gail Kelly a yearly salary of some $12 million) According to all reports, the NAB is right in there at the trough as well – and all the rest of them are equally guilty. For any that we have missed, rest assured they will be publicly exposed as well

But here’s the thing: when these people are forced off their farms, they have nowhere to go. There are no refugee services waiting, such is the case for those who attempt to enter the sovereign borders of this nation. The farmers simply drive to the nearest town – that’s if the banks haven’t stripped their cars off them as well - and they try and find somewhere to sleep. Some are sleeping on the backs of trucks in swags. There is basically no home or accommodation made available to take them. They camp out, shocked and broken and penniless – and they are living on weet bix and noodles. If there is someone that can lend a family enough money to buy food, they will: otherwise they are left completely alone.

And consider this: not one of them has asked for help. Not one. They just do the best they can, ashamed and broken and brainwashed by the banks to believe that everything that has happened is completely their own fault

There is not one single word of this from a politicians lips, with the exception of the incredibly courageous father and son team of Bob and Robbie Katter, who organised the Farmers Last Stand meeting. The Katter family have been in the North since the 1890’s, and nobody who sat in that hall last Friday could question their love and commitment to their own people.

There is barely a mention of any of this as well in the newspapers, with the exception of as brief splash of publicity that followed our visit.

The Minister for Agriculture Barnaby Joyce attended the meeting in a bitter blue-funk kind of mood that saw him mostly hunched over and staring at the floor. He had given $100 million of financial assistance in a lousy deal where the Government will borrow at 2.75% and loan it back at 3.21%.

The last thing these people need is another loan: they need a Redevelopment Bank to refinance their own loans: issuing a loan to pay off a loan is nothing more than financial suicide.

The reality is that Joyce cannot get support from what he calls “the shits in Cabinet” to create a desperately needed Redevelopment Bank so that these farmers can get cheap loans to tide them through to the end of the drought.

Our sources suggest that those “shits in Cabinet” include Malcolm Turnbull – Minister for Communications and the uber-cool trendy city-centric Liberal in the black leather jacket:, Andrew Robb – Minster for Trade and Investment and the man behind the free trade deal, the man who suddenly acquired three trendy Sydney restaurants almost overnight, the man who seems to suddenly desperate to sell off our farms to China – and one Greg Hunt, Environment Minister and the man who is instantly approving almost every single mining project that is put in front of him.

At the conclusion of the meeting, we stood and met some of the people in the crowd. My wife talked to women who would hug her for dear life, and when they walked away people would suddenly murmur “oh, she was forced off last week” or “they are being forced off tomorrow”. Not one of them mentioned it to us. They had too much pride.

The Australian people need to be both informed and desperately outraged about what is being done to our own people. This is about every right that was once held dear to us: human rights, property rights, civil rights. And most all, our right to freedom of speech. All of that has been taken away from these people – and the rest of us need to understand that we are probably next.

In the last four weeks the Newman Government has removed all farmers rights to protest to a mine and given mining companies the rights to take all the water they want from the Great Artesian Basin – and at no cost to them at all.

And all of this has happened under the watch of both Premier Newman and Prime Minister Abbott.

Until Friday, we used to think of Winton as the home of Waltzing Matilda: it was written at a local station and first performed in the North Gregory Hotel. I think it was Don McLean who wrote, “something touched me deep inside…the day the music died”… in his song American Pie, and for us, last Friday was the day music died.

We will never be able to sing Waltzing Matilda again until we see some justice for these people, and all the farmers of the inland.

This is no longer the Australia we once knew: no longer our country, no longer our people, no longer the decent caring leaders we once remembered.

Right now, the banks, the mining mates, the corrupt politicians and all the ‘mongrels in suits’ have won – and the Australian people don’t have a clue what has been done to them.

Like the American Depression and the iconic photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, there is a terrible, gaping wound that has been carved across the heartland of this nation.

We need to fully grasp that, and to understand that our people – dignified, decent and honourable old men like Charlie Phillott - have been deliberately terrorized, brutalised – and sold out.

So if we are ever going to do something, then we’d better realise that its two minutes to midnight – so we’d better move fast.

Regards

David

Please share this as widely as you can across Australia. You are now the only truthful means we have to spread the message. Contact politicians, contact newspapers, radio and television stations. Demand that your voice is heard.

PHOTOS: Charlie Phillott (left) The Australian December 2014
Florence Owens Thompson (Dorthea Lange) March 1936 (originally photographed in b&w)

 
 
 
 
You Had An Indoctrination
 
You Had An Indoctrination
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
Startling new information proves Port Arthur massacre was planned by government
 
Port Arthur Facts
 
 
 

In 1988 NSW Premier, Barry Unsworth said, “It will take a massacre in Tasmania before we will be able to introduce gun laws.” In March 1996 , less than a month before the massacre at Port Arthur, the Gun Coalition’s Tasmanian coordinator Mr. Rowland Brown, wrote to the Hobart Mercury newspaper warning of “a Dunblane-style massacre in Tasmania unless the gun laws were changed” (SOURCE: The Australian Newspaper, 29 th April 1996).

 
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Bank Robbery
 
Bank Robbery
 
 
 

And that’s only one form of bank robbery!

 
 
 
 
Too Lazy To Look
 
Too Lazy To Look
 
 
 

Aint THIS just the truth!

 
 
 
 
Greens, experts echo Bob Katter and CEC on full bank separation
 
 
 
 

The Australian Greens on 8 August announced their policy for a full separation of Australia’s too-big-to-fail banks. The Greens have long expressed support for ending vertical integration in banking; their announcement clarifies that their policy is for the complete, Glass-Steagall-style separation of traditional commercial banking from all other financial activities that Bob Katter MP introduced legislation for on 25 June, the Banking System Reform (Separation of Banks) Bill 2018.

“The Greens are sick and tired of regulators fiddling around the edges”, Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale and financial spokesman Senator Peter Whish-Wilson announced via email. “They’ve been doing it for decades. That’s why we’re announcing today that the first step to fix the big banks is to break them up.”

The Greens plan goes slightly further than Bob Katter’s bill, in that it requires all financial institutions to operate in only one of four areas:

Deposit and loans, including savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages and business lending

Large-scale superannuation funds, including default funds and choice funds

Insurance, including life insurance and general product insurance

Complex financial products used for investment banking, hedge funds, self-managed super funds, financial markets, auditing and liquidation

Bob Katter’s Separation of Banks bill separates the first category, which is traditional banking, from the other three. The Greens would also require any non-bank institutions to do business in only one of the other three categories. While the separation of the first category of traditional banking is the most important, the Greens’ policy would end many of the conflicts of interest that riddle Australia’s vertically-integrated financial system.

The Greens also plan to strip powers from the current, failed regulators: “The second part of our plan ensures customer safety, by handing over regulation of the sector to the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission]. The current regulators, ASIC [Australian Securities and Investments Commission] and APRA [Australian Prudential Regulation Authority], have shown over and over again that they are more interested in keeping the big banks happy than protecting customers. This sector needs a powerful regulator who stands up for us.”

The Greens’ announcement immediately boosted the debate about bank separation, which has been raging globally for years, but for which the Citizens Electoral Council has been a lone voice in Australia until the past 12 months. Around the world, many experts are firm advocates of Glass-Steagall, including Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Nigel Lawson, US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation vice chairman Thomas Hoenig, and former Citigroup chiefs Sanford Weill and John Reed. Following the announcement from the Greens, Australian experts spoke up in support.

In The Australian on 9 August, Adam Creighton quoted former ACCC chairman Allan Fels’s endorsement of full separation. Professor Fels reiterated his April 2018 call for an end to vertical integration: “There are a number of serious structural issues that need to be considered, the first and most obvious is the separation of the activity of creating financial products and then offering so-called independent advisory services to customers on what are the best products,” he said. The experienced regulator also addressed the need to end so-called horizontal integration, by which risky trading activities get subsidised by bank deposits: “A second very important one is whether there should be a structural separation between traditional banking activities and the more risky investment activities. … Banks benefit from the implicit guarantee on their deposit liabilities which flows into their trading activities.”

Fels acknowledged the arguments that customers should be more careful and that more competition was needed in the banking system. “But what can’t be ignored is [the] deep structural conflict of interest between profit maximising activities and the need to provide essential services”, he said. “Some aspects of banking are comparable to a utility, everyone needs banking services to be available, to that extent it’s an essential service.”

The 8 August Guardian reported other expert endorsements: “The former ASIC chief economist Alex Erskine described the package as ’comprehensive’ and said it ’directly addresses several of the failures inherent in the existing regulatory architecture’ revealed by the banking royal commission.

“Andy Schmulow, a financial regulation expert at the University of Western Australia, said the policy was ’far-reaching’. ’But I cannot see lesser responses breaking the cycle of misconduct-cum-consumer abuse followed by apologies and undertakings to put things right, followed by further instances of misconduct,’ he said.”

The Citizens Electoral Council had criticised Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson for his statement in the Senate on 14 February that “I do trust the regulators—people like APRA, the Reserve Bank and ASIC”. Whish-Wilson was justifying the Greens’ support for the APRA crisis resolution “bail-in” bill that the government pushed through the Senate without a formal vote and with just eight Senators present, which the CEC had warned opened a back door for APRA to bail in deposits in order to prop up failing banks in a future financial crisis (similar legislation in India has just been withdrawn due to the concern about deposits).

Senator Whish-Wilson’s declaration of trust preceded the hearings of the banking royal commission, however. With his announcement of the policy for complete bank separation, it seems Senator Whish-Wilson has lost his faith in APRA. “Our regulation of the financial services and of the big banks has failed,” Mr Whish-Wilson said in a press conference. “There’s been a lot of evidence that our regulators both across ASIC and APRA have been captured.”

The CEC welcomes the Greens’ policy of full bank separation. As yet, the Greens have not indicated any plans for legislation, but there is already legislation to achieve full separation, which is Bob Katter’s private member’s bill. That Bob Katter, the CEC and the Greens can agree on full bank separation is illustrative of the bipartisan nature of the support for Glass-Steagall around the world, which spans the entire political spectrum, from “left” to “right”. Bob Katter greeted the Greens’ announcement with this wry 9 August Facebook post: “Normally I like my greens with a T-bone steak but it’s good to see them and former ACCC Chair, Allan Fels backing policy for full bank separation.”

 
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Until next time,
dream big dreams,
plan out how to achieve them,
be continually executing your plans,
enlist people to your causes,
travel and/or read widely, preferably both,
all the while observing what you observe
rather than thinking what you are told to think,
think well of your fellow man,
take time to help your fellow man,
he sorely needs it and it will help you too,
eat food that is good for your body,
exercise your body,
take time to destress,
and do the important things
that make a difference -
they are rarely the urgent ones!

Tom

 
 

Most of the content herein has been copied from someone else. Especially the images. My goodness some people are talented at creating aesthetics! The small bits that are of my creation are Copyright 2014-2018 © by Tom Grimshaw - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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