Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
David Bentley Hart
February 28, 2020
RWNJs [Right Wing Nut Jobs] who lost their biscuit when [Adam] Goodes called out a 13 yr old girl for her racism smoothly segued into abusing a teenage girl for her climate activism, and then launched an attack accusing a 9 yr old with a disability of scamming the public. And they didn't pause to take breath.
Milly Majich
February 24, 2020
It is often said that people in the bush have decided the last few elections. If so, they have installed a Liberal National Coalition which denies climate science. The irony is that it will be the people in the bush who will suffer most from climate change.
BlotReport
February 16, 2020
It might seem bonkers that some of the worst climate-change deniers seem committed to blaming "greenies" for the holocaust on the eastern seaboard. But it makes a sick kind of sense. Somebody has to take the blame and they’ll be damned, literally, if it has to be them. So in a twist, they blame those who have been trying to save us from hellfire.
John Birmingham
February 12, 2020
So the PM ignores the findings of the report by the auditor re sports rorts (don’t stress, all projects were eligible), gets in former political chief of staff to do a report which offloads her for other reasons, then won’t even release that report, but crows about high standards.
Peter Van Onselen
February 2, 2020
If Mr. Morrison’s government genuinely believed the science, it would immediately put a price on carbon, declare a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects and transfer the fossil fuel subsidies to the renewables industries. It would go to the next round of global climate talks in Glasgow in November allied with other nations on the front line of this crisis and argue for quicker and deeper cuts to carbon emissions around the world. Anything less is to collaborate in the destruction of a country.
But the government is intent on doing nothing.
And to the names of those historic betrayers of their people — Vidkun Quisling, Benedict Arnold, Mir Jafar — perhaps one day will be added that of Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia who, when faced with the historic tragedy of his country’s destruction, dissembled, enabled, subsidised and oversaw omnicide, until all was ash and even the future was no more.
Richard Flanagan
January 29, 2020
And being PM means taking responsibility for handling what befalls the nation. Our history is full of Prime Ministers who had events turn against them, whether it was James Scullin becoming PM two days before the 1929 stock market crash, or Robert Menzies turning up just in time to have WWII declared on his watch, or Gough Whitlam's optimistic new government colliding with the Energy Crisis, or John Howard facing the horror of the Port Arthur Massacre, or Kevin Rudd being in the chair for the GFC.
All stepped up and faced the challenges, and in several cases paid a terrible personal and political price.
But until now no PM had ever responded to a devastating national emergency by denying it, then saying it was a state issue, then blaming their wife for them taking a holiday, then systematically failing to take timely action before waging a propaganda war starting with "arsonists" and ending with an attempt to spin it such a way as to benefit mining companies.
That takes a very particular type of coward.
Andrew P. Street
January 25, 2020
Australia Day is when we are expected to selectively forget about what happened in the past so that we can move forward as a better country, and ANZAC Day is when we are told to never forget about what happened in the past so that we can move forward as a better country.
Milly Majich
January 19, 2020
[Morrison] has now been revealed as a dangerous incompetent, an opportunist populist combining policy vacuity with a reckless opportunism and a political tin ear.
Mungo McCallum
January 14, 2020
Climatic changes may mean that by the middle of next century, every year would be a potential “Ash Wednesday” year of extreme bushfire danger, according to CSIRO scientists.
The risk would be greatest in south-eastern Australia, the nation’s most fertile and densely populated region, the scientists have told the national Greenhouse 87 conference.
It is the first time the possibility of such a dramatic increase in bushfire risk has been linked to the global warming many scientists will occur within the next 50 years.
[Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 1987]
