Magnificently well said 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Every detail , and abandonment of the Public Interest that you mention is 💯💯💯spot on . I particularly liked your reference to Neofeudalism . This is the era where both major parties would prefer that the public exist , at the whims and orders of the
obscenely wealthy. If both major parties were a car or truck , they could be said to have needed a grease and oil change years ago , new tyres to replace the aging bald ones , and major work done on the engines of both . This dire need has become too obvious to ignore . Poor fellow our country. ( Ripe pickings for foreign interests 😳😳)
"The people that voted them in with default meal ticket votes have witnessed them turn from the party of the working left, to a symbiotic neoliberal blob that functions as a bipartisan pendulum for the objectives of foreign overlords and the corporate elite."
That is the best analogy if this insipid party i've heard for many a day !
People of a critical bent in Australia tend to underestimate the extent to which this country is considered by the Washington elite to be wholly owned and our subservience non-negotiable.
Decades, nearly a century, of willing surrender to US elite interests, total media compliance and infiltration by security agencies in all major cultural institutions, make the idea of Australian political independence laughable.
Australia‘s economy is of little interest to the US. It is a small market and, apart from the extraction industries, which are virtually all dominated by US financial institutions, can go its own way so long as it doesn’t stray too far from neoliberal orthodoxy and stays well away from Brics.
As military real estate, however, it is priceless. Pine Gap is a major node in the empire’s surveillance and communications web. Naval bases and port facilities can go up overnight and no one complains. Australians have been conditioned by monopolisation of American popular culture to accept its place in US war aims as completely natural and right. English speaking, extremely gullible and pliant, it is taken for granted, correctly, that there is is no remotely effective oppositional movement amongst the general Australian population that would put the master/servant relationship in jeopardy.
To think electoral jockeying will make a major difference in the country’s trajectory is just wrong. Every politician in the country belongs to a class whose interests are to conform to the economic and military status quo . Any vassal state will be allowed an economic class with a smattering of obscenely wealthy individuals and families and a larger class of well paid enablers, technocrats and elected officials, that guide the state functions within allowable parameters and can be relied upon to stamp out dissent. They can differentiate along culture war lines but their ultimate subservience is assured . This is as true of the teals as much as it is of the alp/lnp . (The greens have been surprisingly principled in recent years, particularly wrt to opposing the US/israeli-perpetrated genocide in Palestine. They are a minor exception. Some individuals are actually acting against the interests of the class they hail from. They are few and can never be electorally significant. It’s designed that way.)
We are stuck with an ageing majority that decades of American tv and movies has rendered essentially brain dead. Our political/media class is incapable of reading a book let alone thinking outside the prescribed, incredibly narrow, intellectual bandwidth. (University education, at least in liberal arts, economics, politics, tends to make people stupider rather than smarter.)
Young people find their material conditions are different to those of previous two generations and are more sceptical and more likely to embrace the small but important critical section of US online culture.
Encouraging youth to understand that the US is an actual empire that means you no good, that China and Brics offer a way out of the clutches of the imperium in psycho mode and that putting your energies into electoral politics is largely a waste of time and energy, are small steps that might fuel some radical impetus without which we may as well accept our status as an expendable resource of empire and compete nastily with each other for a place in the small and shrinking class of property owning, reasonably paid functionaries that capitalists need to keep the till ticking over.
The only possible objection I can muster against Grace’s agitprop is that its focus is too narrow. Surely there was room on that Tee for Stokes, Meg O’Neill and Rinehart?
Labor has been "a symbiotic neoliberal blob that functions as a bipartisan pendulum for the objectives of foreign overlords and the corporate elite" since at least the Hawke-Keating years.
It's just that neoliberalism was more acceptable and had done less damage to the economy in those days. So nothing's changed really, chickens coming home to roost and all that.
"Newscorp was waging a coordinated personal attack on Australian Jewish Council Chief Executive Sarah Schwartz for not being a Jew who was not a Zionist" I think you mean 'for being a Jew wo is not also a Zionist'
On the contrary. Joel's prose is dramatic, intriguing, unique and entertaining. Let it be. Don't sanitise it. There maybe an occasional typo. Just read the sentence again if you don't get it the first time.
Magnificently well said 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Every detail , and abandonment of the Public Interest that you mention is 💯💯💯spot on . I particularly liked your reference to Neofeudalism . This is the era where both major parties would prefer that the public exist , at the whims and orders of the
obscenely wealthy. If both major parties were a car or truck , they could be said to have needed a grease and oil change years ago , new tyres to replace the aging bald ones , and major work done on the engines of both . This dire need has become too obvious to ignore . Poor fellow our country. ( Ripe pickings for foreign interests 😳😳)
"The people that voted them in with default meal ticket votes have witnessed them turn from the party of the working left, to a symbiotic neoliberal blob that functions as a bipartisan pendulum for the objectives of foreign overlords and the corporate elite."
That is the best analogy if this insipid party i've heard for many a day !
Absolutely on the money Josh !
People of a critical bent in Australia tend to underestimate the extent to which this country is considered by the Washington elite to be wholly owned and our subservience non-negotiable.
Decades, nearly a century, of willing surrender to US elite interests, total media compliance and infiltration by security agencies in all major cultural institutions, make the idea of Australian political independence laughable.
Australia‘s economy is of little interest to the US. It is a small market and, apart from the extraction industries, which are virtually all dominated by US financial institutions, can go its own way so long as it doesn’t stray too far from neoliberal orthodoxy and stays well away from Brics.
As military real estate, however, it is priceless. Pine Gap is a major node in the empire’s surveillance and communications web. Naval bases and port facilities can go up overnight and no one complains. Australians have been conditioned by monopolisation of American popular culture to accept its place in US war aims as completely natural and right. English speaking, extremely gullible and pliant, it is taken for granted, correctly, that there is is no remotely effective oppositional movement amongst the general Australian population that would put the master/servant relationship in jeopardy.
To think electoral jockeying will make a major difference in the country’s trajectory is just wrong. Every politician in the country belongs to a class whose interests are to conform to the economic and military status quo . Any vassal state will be allowed an economic class with a smattering of obscenely wealthy individuals and families and a larger class of well paid enablers, technocrats and elected officials, that guide the state functions within allowable parameters and can be relied upon to stamp out dissent. They can differentiate along culture war lines but their ultimate subservience is assured . This is as true of the teals as much as it is of the alp/lnp . (The greens have been surprisingly principled in recent years, particularly wrt to opposing the US/israeli-perpetrated genocide in Palestine. They are a minor exception. Some individuals are actually acting against the interests of the class they hail from. They are few and can never be electorally significant. It’s designed that way.)
We are stuck with an ageing majority that decades of American tv and movies has rendered essentially brain dead. Our political/media class is incapable of reading a book let alone thinking outside the prescribed, incredibly narrow, intellectual bandwidth. (University education, at least in liberal arts, economics, politics, tends to make people stupider rather than smarter.)
Young people find their material conditions are different to those of previous two generations and are more sceptical and more likely to embrace the small but important critical section of US online culture.
Encouraging youth to understand that the US is an actual empire that means you no good, that China and Brics offer a way out of the clutches of the imperium in psycho mode and that putting your energies into electoral politics is largely a waste of time and energy, are small steps that might fuel some radical impetus without which we may as well accept our status as an expendable resource of empire and compete nastily with each other for a place in the small and shrinking class of property owning, reasonably paid functionaries that capitalists need to keep the till ticking over.
If people are thinking about how to vote check out The Juice Media's latest post: https://youtu.be/-oxQ5fmiI9M
The only possible objection I can muster against Grace’s agitprop is that its focus is too narrow. Surely there was room on that Tee for Stokes, Meg O’Neill and Rinehart?
Labor has been "a symbiotic neoliberal blob that functions as a bipartisan pendulum for the objectives of foreign overlords and the corporate elite" since at least the Hawke-Keating years.
It's just that neoliberalism was more acceptable and had done less damage to the economy in those days. So nothing's changed really, chickens coming home to roost and all that.
"Newscorp was waging a coordinated personal attack on Australian Jewish Council Chief Executive Sarah Schwartz for not being a Jew who was not a Zionist" I think you mean 'for being a Jew wo is not also a Zionist'
Happy to proof read for you before publication, should you so desire!
On the contrary. Joel's prose is dramatic, intriguing, unique and entertaining. Let it be. Don't sanitise it. There maybe an occasional typo. Just read the sentence again if you don't get it the first time.
I have thought about maing a simlar offer! Sometimes it's difficult to figure out exactly what Joel's point is.
I think you hit the nail on the head