What’s happened in this election, so far, is that two old white guys – Sanders and Trump – set out to win their parties’ nomination with the same strategy: talk about class advantage and disadvantage, how bad it has become and how to fix it.
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An English “expert” was on Radio National the other day talking about how “we” can stop terrorists blowing people up in “our” cities.
For him, “we” is the US/Israel/UK/EU/Canadian/Australian intelligence and military communities, who believe they belong to the best culture. The one that over the past few centuries developed rigorous science, which in turn made industrial production – machines – then electronics and computers. It also developed various election and representation systems, allegedly enabling citizens to participate in planning and management of their own societies. So THEREFORE these blokes reckon they should spread these modern inventions and institutions to every other part of the globe. They tend to pillage the resources of the environments and people they impose themselves on while teaching them about democracy, free trade, Christianity, and eating bad food.
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What is he proposing to do? Can he do it?
US presidential circus episode 4
Two weeks ago in Michigan, a state that used to make America’scars, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the state’s presidential primary -- which should have been huge news. As usual, the TV and print media led with the more hairy news – that Trump won Michigan’s Republican primary.
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Nope – it was already mad.
Americans are angry mad at the fact that the government – and the corporates who run it – have their sticky fingers in everything their citizens do and everything they think, and all the citizens get is another day older and deeper in debt.
And America is batshit crazy mad in that it doesn’t believe in global warming and diplomacy but does believe in angels, insurance agents charging $2,000/month per family to look after their health (not counting the costs of treatments), and it still believes it’s the best country on Earth.
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It was 50 years ago this month that a weekly pop music paper called Go-Set launched across Australia – wholly independent of all the established corporate media. It was a paper for teenagers produced by a teens and twenty-something staff, and while it revolved around the music scene, it also spoke to our quest for an entirely new culture.
I started Go-Set with a fellow Monash uni student, Tony Schauble, and a core group of mates from Monash and from the discos and band culture that was breaking out in Melbourne in the mid-60s.
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This article was also published on the Byron Echo as well as in the Sydney Morning Herald
Australia’s first pop music newspaper was a full-colour tabloid weekly calledGo-Set that launched in the first week of February 1966, exactly 50 years ago. At its peak it sold over 60,000 copies a week.
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“If US aid was cut back to the last dollar, 50 cents of it would still find its way into the generals’ pockets”
CAMBODIA
March, 1975
Note from PF in 2014: Philip Brooks wrote these anonymous dispatches for The Digger, with James Shuvus Williamson, while the two of them lived on the edge and sometimes on the run.
March 18 was the fifth anniversary of the coup that made General Lon Nol premier of Cambodia. Backed by the CIA and the American government Lon Nol declared war on the Khmer Rouge, a war that has been fought by conscripts with American weapons and ever-diminishing food and arms. On March 15, a Digger correspondent flew into Phnom Penh for several days and returned the following impressions.