Friday, 27 August 2010
Australian of Year Patrick McGorry calls for a republic
Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry has criticised Australians for failing to seriously address the issue of a republic.
He likened the country to a 27-year-old who just won't leave home -- "a Gen Y nation".
Delivering the annual National Republican Lecture in Canberra last night, Professor McGorry said Australia needed to "emerge from its prolonged adolescence" and become a republic sooner rather than later.
Professor McGorry, who was chosen as Australian of the Year for his 25 years of service to youth mental health, said he saw parallels between his work with young people and Australia's path to full nationhood.
"Australia's adolescence has lasted more than 100 years since Federation," he said.
On the election campaign trail in north Queensland last week, Julia Gillard said she wanted Australia to become a republic when the Queen, now 84, no longer reigned, and said she planned to lead a national debate on the form the republic should take if she were re-elected prime minister.
"I would think the appropriate time for this nation to move to being a republic is when we see the monarch change," Ms Gillard said.
Asked yesterday if she would consider a referendum on a republic before the Queen died if there were a big enough public push for change, Ms Gillard responded that the issue was "not a priority".
"The Prime Minister supports a republic for Australia but it is not a priority at this time," Ms Gillard's spokesman said.
Tony Abbott, who was at the centre of the pro-monarchist cause in the 1999 referendum that rejected the notion of change, said last week he was certain Australia would never abandon the monarchy in his lifetime.
His spokeswoman said yesterday: "I've got nothing to add to his answer of last week."
But other prominent Australians, including Wayne Goss, Greg Barns and Mungo MacCallum, expressed their strong support for Professor McGorry's Republican appeal.
"While we have come far, we need to finish the journey by showing the world -- and, more importantly, ourselves -- that we proudly and independently stand on our own two feet," former Queensland premier Wayne Goss said.
But David Flint, national convener of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, said comparing Australia to an adolescent was "curious".
"We are one of the world's oldest and stable democracies, we have a Constitution which has been successful," Professor Flint said yesterday.
"Nations aren't individuals on a psychologist's couch . . . nations exist on sound institutions, and it would be foolish to change those institutions purely on the basis of a flippant psychologist's analogy."
Lanai Vasek @'The Australian'
The Power and Money behind the Tea Party
Make no mistake. The Tea Party and other right wing groups like it are not grassroots movements. They are well funded and their agenda is to keep corporations' profits high, put right wingers in power and, at the moment, unseat President Obama. Key among the corporate funders are the billionaire Koch brothers. It's basically corporate electioneering as bribery that is funding a war against Obama. The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny.
@'The New Yorker'Koch Industries Reply
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Johann Hari: Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation
To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana – one of the front lines of this war – is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando – an event that no longer shocks the country.
Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their colleagues: "This is how you learn respect". It is a place where hand grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely, after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse".
Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs.
In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up – and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over an entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply route for the Western world's drug hunger.
Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the "balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another.
When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car, to a four-year-old child, to a family in the "wrong" house watching television, to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 per cent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.
The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: "Plata o ploma". Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since 2006 – yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang violence in an area massively increases.
This might seem like a paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang, you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.
This is precisely what happened – to the letter – when the United States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorised the population and bribed the police. Now 1,000 Mexican Al Capones are claiming their billions and waving their guns.
Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael Levine, who had a 30-year career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of the Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world in the 1980s.
Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'."
So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these murderous gangs really fear – take the source of their profits, drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of Budweiser. And, after legalisation, nobody would do it to sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.
The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called for legalisation, and he has been joined by a battery of former presidents across Latin America – all sober, right-leaning statesmen who are trying rationally to assess the facts.
Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon's claims in response that legalisation would lead to a sudden explosion in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.
Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users – to keep on fighting this war, while any mention of legalisation brings whispered threats of slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.
Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.
How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?
See our captain is in the news again...
England footballer wins continuation of gagging order
No wonder we have started SO badly this season, his mind is on other matters!
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