dieter

In the early 1990's I was a part-time taxi driver. One Saturday morning I was hailed by three 'ladies' at the Elizabeth Street exit of Flinders Street Station. I drove north, reached La Trobe Street to to a right hand turn - the dreaded hook turn - and because of Vic Market there was a lot of traffic. A 'hero' decided to run the light and he got stuck halfway, blocking La Trobe Street traffic heading East, and ruining my opportunity to do my turn. I mumbled 'Knuckf...le' and eventually was able to deliver the ladies to Victoria Park. The Lady in the front passenger seat paid and before she got out she said, I also which to protest at the disgusting language you used in the city. I looked her in the eye and said, Please, go gather your fine ladies, get them back to the safety of my car, you are about to enter the Armageddon of filth. You ain't heard nothing yet...

Yes, since Christmas I have spread at an alarming rate!

I also recall he could hardly kick a ball more than 35 metres in his last year with us.

As soon as BB's name came up vision came to me of Templeton, Mitch C, and all the other duds we've recruited. The Roos didn't seem to have qualms about him walking. Oi WEh, is all I can say, Oi Weh.

You can't argue with these flat earth troglodytes: It's like arguing with the Trumpos who only talk about Fraud, when, ironically, they don't understand they are the real frauds. I'm on your side, L.N., logic does not and never has ruled in the minds of these people: it basically boils down to the British notion of White Supremacy.

Nothing would be nicer than having Rozman running into instant success. Nobody would like this more than me. However, in the way fate decrees and dictates, please let us take and accept his journey as a one step at a time episode. Let's not burden him with our expectations, let's just allow whatever will be to be. He could be great, let's not Moz him.

And the worst kick ever!

A bloke I've come to know well via the Wine Business, roved for Prahran that day - a 50 game ex Bulldog, Graeme Austin.

Unfortunately, Diddums is right about the coming wars: it's the only part of Trump's farewell speech which wasn't a lie. Biden, like Hilary has war drum form- he wanted to invade Iran in 2009. I guess, in the end, you can't stop the US from being itself - a crazed nation of warmongers. JANUARY 20, 2021 On “True Democracy” BY PAUL STREET FacebookTwitterRedditEmail http://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/dropzone/2020/06/IMG_3673-scaled.jpeg Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair On January 5, 2021, one day before Trump sparked his fascist Attack on the Capitol, the liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called for Americans “to defend democracy” by “investigating” Trump and wrote these words: “True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.” That was a remarkable two sentences. One must be an abject ignoramus to think that the United States became a “true democracy” in the 1960s and 1970s (“the civil rights era”). Five and a half decades after Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the nation still doesn’t elect its president through a nationwide popular vote but rather through a bizarre Electoral College system designed to appease slaveholders in the 18th Century. Under the nation’s ancient, deeply conservative Constitution, the American presidential election system is skewed to overrepresent that most reactionary parts of the country. It is next to impossible to remove a criminal sitting president prior to one of the nation’s strictly time-staggered quadrennial and undemocratic elections. And even after losing an election he clearly tried to subvert, a deranged right-wing president like Donald Trump is insanely but constitutionally granted seven more weeks wreak havoc from the seat of the most dangerous office on Earth. The nation’s system for apportioning representatives to the powerful upper body of its legislature is even more absurdly skewed towards the absurd overrepresentation of its most right-wing regions. It boldly violates the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote by giving every state just two U.S. Senators regardless of each state’s total populations. The problem has worsened thanks to a significant shift of population from rural and interior areas to metropolitan and coastal regions over recent decades. The House of Representatives and most state legislatures are badly skewed to the right by widespread partisan and racial gerrymandering. Further skewing the system to the starboard side, the American “citizens” of half-Black Washington D.C. (which has more residents than two U.S. states) lack U.S. Senators and full representation in the U.S. House. The American LatinX “citizens” of Puerto Rico (home to 3 million people, a larger population than 18 U.S. states) don’t have voting members of Congress and don’t vote in presidential elections. The nation’s voting system has been further skewed rightward by racist voter suppression for many decades. It doesn’t help that the Supreme Court gutted key protections formerly to Black voters granted (under the Voting Rights Act) in the 2013 Shelby Count v. Holder decision. The right-wing federal court system, appointed for life, holds authoritarian policy-vetoing power via constitutionally mandated judicial review. It skews well to the right of majority public opinion. As if all this isn’t bad enough, the judicially sanctioned domination of American politics by the superior campaign finance weight of concentrated wealth (under two plutocratic Supreme Court decisions – Citizens United [2010] and Buckley v. Valeo [1976]) combines with numerous other mechanisms of ruling class domination (please see the chapter titled “How They Rule” in my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy) to further ensure that the policy preferences of the nation’s working-class majority are regularly trumped by those of the wealthy Few. By numerous rigorously researched political science accounts[1], the United States is a corporate and financial oligarchy whose “democratic” political and policy contests typically amount to battles between “competitive authoritarian” blocs of capital. Democracy? “True democracy”? Really? When did that happen in America, exactly? The great majority of Americans opposed the Trump tax cut of December 2017. So what? It went through anyway. Seven in ten Americans now back Single Payer health insurance, hardly surprising amidst an epic pandemic. Who cares? As we hold our breath waiting for the beginning of Wall Street Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency, universal national health insurance isn’t remotely on the policy table. Corporate “No Empathy” Joe suggested as a candidate that he would veto Medicare for All if it came to his desk. This was consistent with his promise to elite financial backers in 2019: “nothing would fundamentally change” – there would be no downward distribution of wealth, income, and power – when he became president. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” The choice was made long ago, from the top down. As the great American philosopher John Dewey observed in 1932, U.S. “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey rightly predicted that U.S. politics would stay that way for as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Eight decades later, more than three decades into the arch-capitalist post-New Deal Neoliberal era, Noam Chomsky put it very well: “Since the 1970s, [Dewey’s] shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.” Even before the disgraced and demented fascistic oligarch Trump started his revolting reign, the top tenth of the nation’s upper One Percent had as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. That’s not just an economic fact; it’s also a plutocratic reality. This is a capitalist country, to say the least. Capitalism and democracy, falsely and absurdly conflated with each other in American ideology, are not merely different things. They are fundamentally opposed to one another, for an ever-present democracy-cancelling tendency towards the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands is a central characteristic of capitalism, as Thomas Piketty has ably demonstrated. I wonder if Michelle Goldberg has ever toiled at the wage-earning, nickel and dimed bottom of one of America’s capitalist workplaces, the unapologetically despotic environments in which most working-age Americans spend the majority of their waking hours. Always largely authoritarian, American workplaces are more tyrannical now than they were five and a half decades ago, thanks in no small part to the decimation of organized labor. A third of the nation’s workers belonged to unions in 1965; the current union density rate is barely 10 percent. Globalization, automation, de-unionization, and the shredding of the social safety net have made American worker-citizens considerably more defenseless and powerless on and off the job than was the case in the 1960s and 1970s. The rule of autocratic capital, the dominance of the investor and employer class, has deepened in America across the long and ongoing Neoliberal Era that arose in the late 1970s. It is truly entrenched in the U.S., the self-declared homeland and headquarters of popular self-rule. So much for the rise of “true democracy” in the wake of “the civil rights era”! It’s good that Ms. Goldberg fears and loathes the Republican Party. She should. It’s a white nationalist, fascistic, and even eco-cidal nightmare of an organization – the most dangerous political party on Earth. But Goldberg and other influential commentators would do well to deepen and radicalize their understanding of democracy if they want to help vaccinate the world’s most powerful and dangerous country against authoritarian rule. We must not defenestrate Trump only in order to clear the ground for a more disciplined, intelligent, and competent far right Dear Leader. American elites who habitually describe the American corporate and financial oligarchy as a “democracy” help generate mass cynicism and confusion about the democratic ideal. Democracy is drained of authentic and solid meaning when it is falsely conflated with – and enlisted as cover for – the rule of the wealthy Few. The dollar-drenched denigration of democracy feeds disrespect for egalitarian visions of the common good, the general welfare, and popular sovereignty. With the currency of democracy debased, drowned in the icy waters of capitalist calculation and commodity rule, the unelected dictatorship of money, the way is cleared for the transition to full-on authoritarianism, with Trump’s failed coup remembered perhaps for turning Marx on his head by prefacing tragedy with farce. Endnote 1. Good starter works are Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class (Simon and Schuster, 2011); Ronald Formisano, American Oligarchy (University of Illinois, 2017); Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2011). Paul Street’s new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.

I like the look of this: It must be to our advantage to have Lewis involved.

We ain't hear the last from this lunatic: all he has done is cleave the divide in the US straight down the middle. In an ordinary so-called Democracy, he would have been jailed for this fraudulent real estate shenanigans. Instead, in this lunatic asylum run by the chief lunatics, the Trump reigns. His resonance will reverberate for many years: it can only happen in a country which has and continues to lie about itself and will until its inevitable Armageddon.

Langer was always a member of Australian Cricket Dark side: witness the bail removal against Sri Lanka. Paine's true colors have emerged - he is a typical spoilt brat Aussie sook - and to even contemplate Smith after his latest escape into follyland is bizarre. Give it to Cummins, a man who talks the mensch talk and walks it as well. I would love to see an Australian Cricket captain who has read Pascoe's Dark Emu and been affected by it. Can you imagine Clark, Warne or Symonds even reading?????

You are a troll after all!

Stan Grant nails the deep-seated wrecking ball which lies in the heart and soul of that sham people call US Democracy. The sick politics at the heart of this week's US crisis go deeper than Donald Trump By International Affairs Analyst Stan Grant Posted 4ddays ago, updated 4ddays ago The President's dangerous delusions are a reminder the US has always teetered on the edge of collapse.(AP: Jacquelyn Martin) Share This week's insurrection in Washington has been shocking but not at all surprising. It's part of a long deep unravelling of America. The angry mobs storming the Capitol building reflect a broken country where tens of millions of people have traded the American dream for American carnage and no longer know what truth is. American politics, business and media have been complicit in delivering the US to this moment. The sad scene of a country that billed itself as a beacon of democracy — always contestable anyway — now tearing itself apart has also revealed the hypocrisy of those condemning it. Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. WATCH Duration: 33 seconds33s Trump supporters scuffle with police outside the Capitol building. Former president George W Bush says it is a "sickening and heartbreaking" attack on democracy. America, he says, resembles a "banana republic". But this is from a man who pushed the idea of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. His lies led to more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths, upturned the Middle East, setting off unending conflict, and cost the US $US2 trillion. Bill Clinton says the attack on the US Capitol building is fuelled by four years of "poisonous politics" by Donald Trump. This is Clinton who as president disgraced the White House, perjured himself and became only the second president to be impeached; Donald Trump became the third. While Trump pedals his conspiracies of election fraud, remember Hillary Clinton told Democrats there was "a vast right-wing conspiracy" trying to destroy her husband's presidency. Former US president George W Bush's own lies have created instability in the Middle East, writes Stan Grant.(Reuters: Larry Downing) America has always teetered on the edge of collapse American political leaders have been playing loose with the truth, deepening partisan divisions and whipping up anger amongst their supporters for decades. Trump has exploited sick politics: from Richard Nixon's Watergate lies and corruption to Bush and Clinton, the road leads to Donald Trump. The President's dangerous delusions and his crazed followers should remind us that America has always teetered on the edge of collapse: a nation born in crisis and awash with bloodshed. Let's not forget it was created by revolution, torn apart by civil war and has seen presidents assassinated. The 1960s were marked by violence, revolt and political killings and they lit the fuse for division and tribalism. America is locked in a perpetual culture war, lacerated by class, race and faith. Political writer Michael Cohen traces today's malaise to the election of Nixon in 1968, a time he calls a "maelstrom", a violent whirlpool of disorder. Americans formed battle lines, shouting each other down over black civil rights, gay equality, family values, gun laws, abortion or feminism. That year revealed a deep cleavage among the American people and it profoundly reshaped politics. The Democrats lost the white working class that was captured by an increasingly conservative and religious Republican right. Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. WATCH Duration: 2 minutes 41 seconds2m 41s US President Donald Trump condemns the violence in the US Capitol. Trump didn't pretend to govern for all Trump was right when he said: "This country was seriously divided before I got here." At least presidents before him paid lip service to unity. Trump has never pretended that he governs for all. The country was ripe for his brand of political opportunism: us-versus-them populism feeding on fear, anxiety and exploiting racism. He was a Barnum and Bailey political circus act made for the 24/7 media age, where "truth" is a matter of opinion. Journalist Matt Taibbi in his book Hate Inc says the news media is addictive and anxiety inducing, pitting people against each other while often failing to hold power accountable. The big cable news broadcasters, he says, are politically partisan, each speaking into their own echo chambers. Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. WATCH Duration: 9 seconds9s Rioters seen posing with police on social media. Little wonder Americans have lost faith in truth and trust in institutions. Growing inequality has fractured the country, with the working poor left behind while power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of what has been dubbed an "American meritocracy". The financial crash of 2008 left the country poorer and deeply scarred; ordinary Americans lost their homes and their jobs while rich bankers got bailed out. Research by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton reveals a shattered America of broken families, drug dependency, increasing suicide, declining wages or no work at all. To these people, they say, Washington politics "looks more like a racket". Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. WATCH Duration: 2 minutes 20 seconds2m 20s Joe Biden slams pro-Trump mob as 'domestic terrorists'. A return to politics as usual is not enough Trump will soon be gone from office and the Democrats will now control both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Joe Biden has an opportunity to deliver change to America but nothing he has said thus far gives us any confidence he can reverse 40 years of drift, despondency and disillusion. After the mayhem of this week, all he has had to offer is the same old platitudes of coming together and respecting the rule of law. This crisis demands more than Biden's appeal to decency and consensus. A return to politics as usual is not enough. America appears as a nation that refuses to be governed. Some have called the events of this week an attempted "coup" or "sedition", and there are those fearing a wider conflict. Time to break up the union? So where to America? It could always disintegrate; fracture and break apart. In his new book Break it Up, writer Richard Kreitner says: "There never was any guarantee the country would survive, and there is none now." Kreitner reminds us America has always lived with the threat of collapse. From the start, there were those who believed even then the union was too big to hold. Read more about the fallout from the US election: What does impeachment mean for Donald Trump? ANALYSIS: The America that delivered us Trump is now trying to rid itself of him NYC cuts financial ties with Trump Organization It survives by compromise and when that failed in the 1860s Americans made war on each other. Today it is a country whose electoral college system can ignore popular will, whose Supreme Court is politically stacked, where power is held and passed around like a family heirloom. Kreitner says there is too much at stake for complacency. He says Americans "need to recreate" their country. The constitution needs an overhaul. Congress doesn't work, the House is not truly representative and the Senate has too much power. The country's deep inequalities are destroying the promise of America. It must redistribute wealth and reach back to those left behind. Kreitner's book is not a call for an end to America but a warning about how it could end. After this week it is timely and sobering reading. He quotes one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin: "We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Franklin left Americans a gift and a curse: "A republic, if you can keep it." Posted 4ddays ago, updated 4ddays ago

He started spruiking FRAUD long before the election. Just about every time he has opened his mouth before and since becoming POTUS, he has told one hyperbolic lie after the other_ you may recall how he invoked the US Air Force for fighting the Brits during the War on Independence, he is a mental midget who knows only how to get his way by threat, cheque books, bullying and manipulation. He is an indictment of the US of America that they elected such a narcissistic, racist sexual predator to become their President. And, yes, I would never vote for any of the snivelling evil charlatans the Democrats have spewed out. The US is a very sick place. And just you watch, we ain't seen nothing yet. Trump has unleashed total mayhem. It couldn't come to e better place, a country which has fooled the world from day one, most of all itself.

I fail to see how any of the people/pundits you referred me to are interested in healing. I understand them as people who keep asserting that 'our' way is and was always ok. My problem with this is to do with the total amnesia about not only the acts of Colonialism, but also the ongoing issues which victims of this Colonialism now face. You show me pictures and portraits of Black Americans who I assume think everything is A Okay. Well, they ain't baby, they never have been. I also saw in the one on one discussion I watched on You Tube between a Black Brit and whoever he was, reference to all the great women and LGBT writers who prospered in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, as though they were ever considered and accepted as mainstream. My mind boggled at that. What I find most interesting in your Weltanschauung is that its axis is and always will be that somehow what 'we' have and done is and always will be superior to anything those heathen and communist and Iraqis have done. You have amnesia about the KKK, about what Trump has done and is doing, you have amnesia about the fact that the world is surrounded by US bases, all of their missiles and weapons of Mass Destruction pointed at China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, as though these people/nations are not worth any more than our ridicule and holier than thou posturing. I don't like the world you want to impose on me, it doesn't and won't change a bloody thing.

Five, actually...

I saw a pile of herald-Suns near the checkout at my local safeway, saw that this 'headline' took up most of the front page. I thought it was a typically low act from an organisation with a history of action from the gutter. There is a whole lot more going on in the world than something Patton is alleged to have done.

You also imply that while its okay for the US to have enough WMD's to blow up the Universe five times, it's a crime for Iraq to be able to defend itself. It's the same reason North Korea armed itself to the hilt because otherwise the US would have destroyed it again. So I now fully understand where you are coming from: you believe in White Supremacy, you believe only White people should be able to have arsenals etc etc.

Keep wheeling out the Uncle Toms. Have you heard of BLM?

In Quarantine, enforced by Dictator Dan. I am poeta Credlin, I am Andrew Bolt. I am Rudolfo, I am looking after your welfare. I may even be Devine!!!!!!

I agree, they were so very respectful. Smashing windows and looting offices etc is no crime, nor is stealing property. Yes, Trump is gonna win, of course he is, P2J. Now, can I suggest a good lie down, an ingestion of about 15 valiums, and wash it down with your tipples of choice and when you wake up, the world might be a different place. You'll no doubt wake up in the heaven your evangelical mentors have prescribed and you can maybe have a game of golf with St Paul, maybe even Jesus, who, I hear, is gonna play at one of Donnie's Scottish courses, provided he doesn't have top self quarantine from heaven and have to wear a mask.

I do not think honestly, therefore I am.

You've gone quiet, duckie. No bragging after THE BIG EVENT you were warning us about. I just saw a Youtube Interview with one of the heroes who the Police allowed to 'storm' the Capitol. Apparently one of them called for a Prayer to God when they stood in the Senate. I can just imagine God looking down and feeling proud of these lunatic yokels. But then again, Ain't that America!!!! Land of the Free. I know, P2J, they was Antifas in disguise...And, I know, Donald T is still gonna win...

If you read my posts, all have been in good faith. If you still wish to uphold the US line about WMD's you are free to do so. If you believe that what Saddam's son is accused of doing was even vaguely relevant to this War Crime, that's up to you. ( For the record, you might wish to look into the sexual crimes of one D.TRump, the so-called President of the most farcical nation in history. Not to mention Dangerous.) At least we agree about what you call liberal democracy. Where we differ is that I don't believe the US is or ever has been a liberal democracy. Ask any Black person about the depth of your description, go on, read some James Baldwin, listen to some Mohamed Ali instead of fake americans like Hitchens and Fergussson. By the way, my name is Dieter. It's my real name. If I was the troll you make me out to be, I'd call myself TRR-owll or something.