If you go and ask the “average” Australian on a Melbourne or Sydney street who owns the banks and large public companies in Australia, most will answer “Australians through superannuation and mutual funds”. This belief gives Australians a sense of pride in “Australian private enterprise”, and may even assist Australians grudgingly accept high bank charges and interest rates; “after all we own the banks”. However if one examines the annual reports of most of the large Australian public companies, names like HSBC, JP Morgan, Citibank, and BNP are very prominent in the tops 20 shareholders lists. There has been a major shift in the Australian corporate ownership-scape over the last decade. And a silent one at that.
Category: Head Stories
Western Media Set Up North Korea For War Western so-called news media coverage of the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula is like watching a cross between a bad James Bond movie and a cheap horror flick about flesh-eating zombies. It would be funny if the danger of war was not so serious and imminent. The disturbing direction of the Western media coverage is to set up North Korea – a poor impoverished country – for an all-out military attack by the world’s nuclear superpower psychopath – the United States. Paradoxically, this danger is being incited by “news” corporations that pompously claim to be free-thinking bastions of independent journalism, when in reality they are nothing more than progenitors of the worst kind of pulp fiction.
On April 12, 2011 the Japanese government officially announced that the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster had reached level 7, the highest on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Before Fukushima, the only level 7 case was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, whose 25th anniversary was marked on April 26. Two and a half months after the 3.11 catastrophe, the first to affect multiple reactors, TEPCO and the Japanese government continue to struggle to bring the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi under control. TEPCO estimates that the problems could be solved in six to nine months now appearing extraordinarily optimistic and plans have been announced to close nuclear power plants deemed of particularly high risk such as the Hamaoka facility.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stands out. But it is not because the secretive Stalinist regime is a nuclear pariah threatening global security, as the Western corporate media would have us believe. No, North Korea stands out for being a beacon of rationality and, incredible as it may seem, peace. Bear in mind the following features: No other state on earth has endured a trade embargo or a gamut of diplomatic, financial and economic sanctions more than North Korea. For more than 63 years, since the beginning of the Korean War (1950-53), the DPRK has been frozen out of normal relations with other international states because of a trade embargo imposed by Washington. This illegal straightjacket has been tightened several times down through the decades with resolutions and sanctions implemented by the UN Security Council – the latest being instigated last Friday.
US corporate-financier funded think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), declared in its “post-Chávez checklist for US policymakers,” that the US must move quickly to reorganize Venezuela according to US interests. Upon its checklist were “key demands”: The ouster of narco-kingpins who now hold senior posts in government The respect for a constitutional succession The adoption of meaningful electoral reforms to ensure a fair campaign environment and a transparent vote count in expected presidential elections; and
This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation. “How do we know that the CIA was behind the coup that overthrew Hugo Chávez?” asked historian William Blumin 2002. “Same way we know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. That’s what it’s always done and there’s no reason to think that tomorrow morning will be any different.” Now we have a bit more evidence the CIA and the FBI connived with reactionary elements to not only briefly overthrow Chávez, abolish the constitution and the National Assembly, but later assassinate the Venezuelan State Prosecutor, Danilo Anderson.
Pyongyang, March 5 (KCNA) — A spokesman for the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army issued the following statement on Tuesday: On Dec. 12 last year the DPRK legitimately and successfully launched a satellite for peaceful purposes, ensuring international transparency, going beyond practice, and choosing a comparatively mild situation for it. Seizing the DPRK’s satellite launch as an occasion for stifling it from the outset, the U.S. and its allies deliberately negated the DPRK’s sovereignty over its satellite launch. They finally prodded the UN Security Council into adopting a “resolution on sanctions” before opting for high-handed hostile acts against the DPRK. These hostile acts are still going on.
North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. Most people in America consider North Korea as an inherently aggressive nation and a threat to global security. Media disinformation sustains North Korea as a “rogue state”. The history of the Korean war and its devastating consequences are rarely mentioned. America is portrayed as the victim rather than the aggressor. North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three year period of intensive bombings: “After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”
Watching American politics is a bit like watching American-style gladiator wrestling on television. Part of you wants to flick on to the next TV channel for something more satisfying, edifying and real, but still you watch the stupefying spectacle with all its bluster and hype. You know it’s contrived, pseudo, hammed-up and downright fake, but ironically because of all these dubious qualities, there is something compelling about the procedures. Can these people be for real?
Take the new US secretary of state John Kerry. He made his first overseas trip this week to various capitals in Europe and the Middle East. Compared with his bullish and vulgar predecessor, Hillary Clinton, the urbane Mr Kerry seems like a breath of fresh air.
I apologize to my American readers for this short introduction; yet, most Israelis have no ideawhom Rosa Parks was. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger after the white section was filled. She was arrested for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. This small act triggered civil rights protests across America and earned Rosa Parks the title “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement;” she became an international symbol of resistance to racial segregation, achieving prominence in the civil rights movement together with civil rights leaders, including National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.