Tell Anna Bligh to get her hands off OUR public assets!
Time/Date: 4:30-6pm, Tues Nov 10
Meet Outside State Parliament, Cnr George & Alice Sts, City

For more information, visit saveourpublicassets.org

YOu seem not to have comprehended my post quoting MLK and JFK and a number of other posts I have addressed to you on the other thread. If you think I am wrong about 9/11, then prove me wrong, (but I think, if you objectively look at the debate on the other thread, now that Bob and Adrew Reynolds are, in effect, arguing against Isaac Newtons’s Second Law of Motion, you would concede that I am right).

If you can prove me wrong, then fine. Your point about me being seen as “daggett is the mad conspiracy theorist” would be correct.

However, if I am right, then should I spurn JFK’s and Solon’s counsel to not avoid controversy, just because some people regard taking a stance in support of the 9/11 Truth Movement as off-limits?

If I am right in my view that people, innocent of the crime of the murder of almost 3,000 US citizens on 11 September 2001, have been falsely blamed by those who did commit the crime and been bombed, shelled, shot, killed, maimed, jailed, tortured and displaced from their homes in their many hudreds of thousands as a result, should I spurn MLK’s counsel and remain silent about this?

If people judge me as loopy because I speak my mind, then too bad.

But, as I point out, we are never going to rectify all that is rotten with the world if we attempt to sweep such a pivotal part of the overall picture as 9/11 under the carpet.

Lefty E,

Of course you are right.

However, I think we need t0 recognise that most of the political class are no longer interested in looking after the public interest. They are there, apart from to look after themselves to help the corporate elites ransack the economy.

If you have not read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” of 2007 go out and buy a copy. Everyone I know who has read it thinks it is brilliant. (Personally I think it is flawed in one or two aspects, and I could have skimmed over Chapter 2, but I still think it is head and shoulders above anything else that has been written so far this century.)

It shows how the rich have deliberately exploited natural and economic disasters to advance their interests. Their criteria for success is no longer in any way related to the overall benefit of society.

If it was possible to reason with the likes of Bligh, Fraser or down in Victoria, Brumby or Bracks, it would have happened long before now. The fact that they persist in policies that not only redistribute wealth away from the poor, but, on top of that, reduce the overall wealth available our society aas a whole, only to enrich an unbelievably selfish and shortsighted few, confirm that Klein was right.

John D,

You need to appreciate that Bligh couldn’t care less about her power base.

My own theory about why she failed to act decisively to legislate for abortion reform, as she could so easily do, is that it suits her to have political activists tied up for years fighting these causes. The energy that many are to expend trying to bring about abortion law reform is energy they won’t be able to spend fighting privatisation, the Traveston Dam and dictatorial state government planning powers.

My guess is that was also the motivation behind her decision to pour rat poison fluoride into our drinking water.

At the moment, Anna seems to be flapping around from photo opp to photo opp instead of stopping and thinking through what the Qld gov has to do actually make life in Qld better than it was when the Nats were in power. She also needs to think about her power base – effectively banning abortion, fighting to pay Qld teachers less than other in other states and a failure to improve public education, health etc. and now asset sales must be making Labor supporters think that they have little to lose if the socialist country party gets back into power.

I say, eg, to the Victoria government: you’ve already publicly accepted that Kennett’s privatised rail in Melbourne has
a. Been a service provision disaster, and
b. Has not saved the Victorian taxpayer one single cent.

Its important to actually reflect on the evidence. There is nothing economically rational about this situation. Even the most uncritical Friedmanite would have to concede that the only thing worse than a public monopoly is a private one.

Nationalise it! We dont have a user-pays system. We have a user pays *twice* system: once to Connex, and then via our taxes in the form of Vic govt subsidies.

This was suposed to save the state money. Its hasnt.

Policy FAIL – therefore, renationalise it. Then the state will reap the big profits going to Connex, despite offering a 3rd rate service. It can pay for social policy initiatives. It really is that simple.

If you had spent the last 14 months brushing up your search engine optimisation and online marketing skilz you could actually have had a serious influence on the privatisation debate. Instead you got distracted by someone else’s bullshit.

“Personally I don’t see how the media could have ignored the Greens any more than it turned out they were. To the contrary, I think it could only have raised the profile of the Greens immensely if they had pointed out Labor’s past record of privatisation and demanded a commitment from Fraser and Bligh not to sell any more assets.”

See thats a valid point, and yet the only thing people are gonna remember about you from this site is “Daggett is the mad conspiracy theorist.”

And if you’d really got a handle on blowing your own trumpet effectively online … well that idea could have more traction than it currently does. At the moment its all about you not any effective ideas you might have. (This is meant to be constructive btw, not just an attack on you for the sake of it. I hope you know you “Can do better.”)

By intention was to break it up with bold subheadings, but I used <blockquote></blockquote> tags in place of <strong></strong> tags and vice versa. Can’t fix that now. I think duplicating that post to fix that would not be helpful overall.

Labor Outsider wrote:

… my favourite part was the call for the Governor to sack the Government. The lack of constitutional grounds doesn’t seem to bother James too much!

Yes, it does. Why don’t you read my post again properly? I acknowledged that the Governor may not have the power nor the will to sack the Government, but explained why I believe that the Queensland public express the view that this is what they wish her to do.

Queensland is not being Governed democratically today in any true sense. The clear wishes of the Queenslad public in regard to privatisation, petrol subsidies (which I personally oppose, BTW), forced loca governmen amaogalmations, the Traveston Dam, dictatorial state Government seizure of local Government planning powers, etc., etc. are being wantonly and flagrantly disregarded.

There can be no doubt whatsover that Anna Bligh would not even be in office today if she had revealed her true intentions back in March, yet she and her Government arrogatly presume to have the right not only to continue to impose those decisions upon us, but even to spend our own taxpayers’ dollars to lie to us in defence of those decisions.

We are going to be both heavily in debt and left without any family silver paid for by us, our parents and grandparents if they are not stopped. If there was ever a clear case for people having the right to recall elected representatives, who are no longer governing in accord with the people’s will, then this is surely it.

Even if it proves impossible to remove this Government, at least people should make known that what decisions are being made today, are being made without their consent and without any electoral mandate, whatsoever. Those, who intend to unscrupulously exploit those decisions should then consider themselves warned that a future Government, that enjoys the support of the Queenland public, should not consider itself bound to honour those corrupt arrangements.

I wrote:

The incompetence and likely corruption of the Queensland Governmet approaches that of many past fabled Third World banana republics and they are almost as unaccountable as any military dictatorship.

Then Labor Outsider wrote:

Setting aside the fact that as far as I know Bligh has yet to launch any military action against her opponents, nor divert public money to private Swiss bank accounts, it makes it hard to know whether James is for or against upholding constitutions or not!

How members of the Queensland Government intend to gain in future from the theft of publicly owned assets that they are facilitating today is unclear, and obviously it would be difficult to prove, whether it were to be through Swiss bank accounts or through other means, such as simply positions on company boards subsequent to retirement or job offers to sons and daughters, etc.

However, that is really beside the point at the moment at the moment.

The Queensland Government may not have launched military action, but they have stooped to using Howard’s Work Choices legislation to prevent workers who stand to be affected by privatisation from holding workplace meetings to discuss the issue. On at least one occasion, they threatened to dock four hours’ pay from any worker who attended such a meeting, regardless of teh meeting’s length. It’s a shame that the workers did not turn around and take the full 4 hours off, or, indeed, the rest of the day. The Queensland public would have warmly applauded them for having done so.

Does speaking one’s mind on 9/11 make one an unsuitable candidate?

Labour Outsider wrote,

Just visited said blog and was alarmed to find a tab on 9/11 that contains a whole lot of posts that support the bizarre claim that the US government was behind the whole thing.

Martin Luther King famously said in 1967 when he changed his view and opposed the Vietnam War:

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

As I wrote on the now extremely long forum discussion about 9/11:

… I fully accepted the US Government version at the time and (unfortunately) did not even begin to seriously question it until 6 years later.

Since then, particularly beginning 14 months ago, now I began to seriously study 9/11 and found that the whole Official US Government story about 9/11 was a pack of lies. As I explained at length in that post and elsewhere, on that forum, I didn’t just change my view overnight. I carefully read and listened to arguments for and against the official account of 9/11 including a radio debate between Richard Gage and ’sceptic’ Michael Shermer to whose e-sceptic e-mail list I was subscribed at the time, and who I greatly respected until that point.

As a result of that debate my view shifted firmly to be in support of the 9/11 Truth movement. It happens that quite a few people in Australia are also aware that the Official account about 9/11 is a lie, but choose to remain silent. If you approach most people who sell far left Socialist Newspapers including Green Left on the street, there’s a good chance they will put to you essentially what was put to Martin Luther King when, in 1967, he started to state his opposition to the Vietnam war, as he related earlier in that abovementioned speech:

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

Of course, the parallel between those who questioned Dr. King’s adopting a stance against the Vietnam War and those on the left who are silent about 9/11 in 2009 in Australia is not exact, because the latter purport to oppose the wars for which 9/11 was used as a pretext.

Nevertheless, I am sure that if MLK were around today, his views on those who remain silent on 9/11 would be essentially the same.

Your comment, essentially dismissing me as a nut for having made my views on 9/11 known confirm that it would be easier in many ways for me to remain silent on 9/11.

In many ways it would be easy, also, in a more practical sense to remain silent on 9/11 because, like most people appalled at the direction in which our society is headed I already had more than enough concerns before I worked out the truth about 9/11. It would have been easy for me to come up with excuses not to provide practical help to those few decent and clear-headed people in the country today, who are prepared to tell the truth about 9/11, but I am not going to leave them in the lurch.

One way I lend them practical support is to make sure that I attend the Truth Action protests that occur on the 11th of each month all over the world. In Brisbane they are currently held outside Central Station.

Another way I lend them practical support is to publicise the forthcoming tour by Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He and other members of the US 9/11 Truth Movement, brought to Australia are enormous expense will be in Brisabane at the Clayfield Bowling Club on Thursday 17 Novemeber from 7PM. I urge you to attend. I can guarantee that if you go there and listen to the case to be put by Richard Gage with an open mind you will be convinced at the end of the night.

On the other hand, if you are so sure that the case of the 9/11 Truth Movement is wrong, why not try to prove me and Richard Gage wrong by coming along and putting to him the most difficult questions you can come up with at that publc meeting?

I suggest that you don’t pass up that opportunity unless you have other pressing commitments on that night. A number of ordinary people on ordinary incomes in this country are likely to be out of pocket to the tune of many thousands of dollars even if the tour goes well.

Further details of meetings in Sydney on the weekend of 14 and 15 November and in Melbourne on Tuesday 17 November can be found here and at thehardevidence.com.

The prospects for anti-privatisation Independent candidates

I don’t think I am necessarily the best candidate to stand against Andrew Fraser.

If someone else more articulate, more experienced and better qualifed, who stood for essentially all the same policies that I stood for in March 2009 (and, prior to that, in the Brisbane City Council elections of March 2008) stood for election, then I would happily throw my weight behind such a candidate.

However, as it turns out, I happened to be the only candidate in all of Queensland who understood that privatisation was an issue at stake in those elections and who took a stand on it.

For years prior to that I had attempted to persuade the Greens to adopt a few of the basic commonsense policies that the Labor Party had sacrificed on the altar of ‘free market’ fundamentalism, in particular, emphatic opposition to privatisation, a peoples’ bank and direct Government spending on useful and sustainable public works, but with no luck. I did so in 2003 as a member of the ACT Greens and I have tried since on numerous occasions as a relatively sympathetic outsider. In October 2006, I tried to put to the Greens and others at a large public meeting against the Hale Street Bridge white elephant that they sponsor a broad coalition of independents to challenge all sitting Councillors, both Labor and Liberal in the forthcoming council elections. My written proposal which I attempted to put at that meeting was sidelined on the basis that “it would be referred to Greens committee”.

I never heard back from the Greens.

In 2008 they did precisely what they haved done during every election before and every election since, which was to run a narrowly based campaign, controlled from the top down, focused only on a few of the most limited motherhood Green issues and I think the results speak for themselves.

Campbell Newman’s stranglehold on power was strengthened and he has been able to continue with his massviely costly white elephant construction projects and overdevelopment, largely destroying the social fabric of Brisbane in the process.

On Sunday 22 March, the day before Anna Bligh announced the early early elections, I approached Bob Brown and Ronan Lee after a Press Conference and tried to put to them, amongst other things that the Greens campaign against privatisation. Bob Brown’s answer was that they wouldn’t because they would have been ignored by the media if they did.

Personally I don’t see how the media could have ignored the Greens any more than it turned out they were. To the contrary, I think it could only have raised the profile of the Greens immensely if they had pointed out Labor’s past record of privatisation and demanded a commitment from Fraser and Bligh not to sell any more assets.

Anyhow, Bob Brown, Drew Hutton, Ronan Lee all walked off and in the ensuing election campaign no Greens candidate that I am aware of, bar one, very briefly, breathed a word in opposition too privatisation.

The results speak for themselves. In spite of dissatisfaction with both the major parties and having the profile of Ronan Lee a sitting member of Parliament, the Greens actually got a smaller vote (if we remember that this time they contested all seats for the first time) than previously and Ronan Lee lost his seat.

In spite of that I am not hostile to the Greens. I hope that, in future, they get a high vote (although, obviously not at my own expense or the expense of other good independents) and win more seats but anyone who expects them to show the way forward, given their lamentable past record, is deluded.

Just visited said blog and was alarmed to find a tab on 9/11 that contains a whole lot of posts that support the bizarre claim that the US government was behind the whole thing.

You haven’t been paying attention.

Just visited said blog and was alarmed to find a tab on 9/11 that contains a whole lot of posts that support the bizarre claim that the US government was behind the whole thing.

So, don’t think that James would be an ideal “independent labor” candidate for anything.

Moreover, having read the entire post above (don’t care much about the length, just its lack of clarity and cohesion), my favourite part was the call for the Governor to sack the Government. The lack of constitutional grounds doesn’t seem to bother James too much!

However, that is kind of odd, given the statment below:

“The incompetence and likely corruption of the Queensland Governmet approaches that of many past fabled Third World banana republics and they are almost as unaccountable as any military dictatorship.”

Setting aside the fact that as far as I know Bligh has yet to launch any military action against her opponents, nor divert public money to private Swiss bank accounts, it makes it hard to know whether James is for or against upholding constitutions or not!

Bizarre…

This is at the night-owl, so locals, here in her electorate, can’t help but notice. It may very well be having an effect: At the last west end street festival, a cuppla weeks ago, just around the corner from where her electoral fortification office is, and where she used to be the very pinup of pollies, her walkthrough with greg and spooks looked a grim duty. Previously unimaginable (anti-asset sales) abuse from lubricated crowdsters was hurled her way. ( What’s that classic pollie lament, ” A fete worse than death”?)

Maybe it’s possible, with the anti-assets sales/ betrayal scab there to be picked at, that the same ‘freemantle’ strategy (19) ( tories don’t run in seats with enough green votes for the labor-preferncing watermelon brigade to be big enough to guarantee the tories can never win) could see Anna lose her seat.

I reckon she’ll happy to be taking up her reward position with bechtel or whover it is that will be enjoying her benificence in delivering up the goodies, ASAP. She’s got her spot in history, first woman premier and all that, hubby’s in a good spot, she’s not mad with greed, and values having a real life too much to have to put up with the daily merde ( if mark, paul norton and kim are on the money, comments 47,48 & 51 about her only getting the gig on condition of being, please pardon the canin-ist expression, Bill Ludwig’s bitch, and looking after Mike Kaiser), of being only a cipher, with no real power, the boys of the right doing all the deals. That really would suck.

That won’t work, but by then, if Larissa is unavailable, (having picked up a senate quota), and she is prepared to anoint you, urge her constituency to bestow their 24.9% three party preferred votes on you, AND you can make the tory machine droids see sense, …

(that they will never get up in such a green electorate, with its poison payload of watermelon greens who, when it comes to the crunch, from the inevitable third position, deliver their preferences to labor, regardless of official party injunctions, and effectively deliver the seat to labor on a plate,) …

and deploy the Freemantle strategy, ie run dead, or actually not at all, then Fraser is just so much roadkill* ( he only got 38% of the 3 party preferred, 1.5% ahead of the tory, absolutely depending on them watermelon preferences for his seat, bigtime).

*Apologies to kangaroos everywhere, for the odious comparison.

In which case, the thing to do would be to write a punchy summary here, with a link to the full text at Daggett’s own site.

And Daggett it would have been so much easier to read and comprehend if you had spread that over 3 comments.

Flaming you? What DD wrote is right upthread there, and you linked to it yourself. Do you really think that polite and genuinely helpful advice is “flaming”?

“If it was truly waffle, and it could have been shown to be, then there may have been some justification for what he wrote.”

No, what he wrote was explicitly, obviously, and only about the length of your comment. Hence completely justified.

I read your comments on the other thread, regardless of length, because it’s become something of a habit. But DD’s completely right – I was genuinely interested to hear you talk about something else for a change, but found myslef scrolling through cos it was too long.

Do yourself a favour and take on advice from such patient, non-snarky and statesmanlike blogging veterans as DD.

This is me trying to be genuine and friendly too – no bullshit. I’m not as good at it though.

And DD – [all together now] – get a blog dude.

Perhaps Derrida Derider should have at least started to read it before flaming me. If it was truly waffle, and it could have been shown to be, then there may have been some justification for what he wrote.

I am well aware that posts should be generally kept short, and generally do keep them short (except when I have a lot to respond to as is the case on another forum at the moment).

However on this occasion, I thought I had a lot that was worth saying on the issue that wasn’t generally known and that is why I wrote a long post.