The Isocracy Network

Just as night will always follow day, so too is any political event immediately followed by the spin. This is a crucial moment, as spin’s architects and mouthpieces try to shape the messiness of reality into a clear line of narrative, sometimes predetermined, other times improvised, before facts can ossify in undesirable ways. Nowhere is this more important than after an indecisive election such as the 2017 United Kingdom one. In the absence of an emphatic result that speaks for itself the opportunity exists to craft a version of reality that will hopefully resonate in the collective public mind. Sometimes this special pleading is laughably obvious, such as the Liberal Democrats’ forlorn attempt to suggest that the night had been anything other than a harsh reminder of their ongoing slide into irrelevance. And here is another feeble argument posturing as a profound statistic: Labour under Jeremy Corbyn won their highest percentage of seats since 2001! Yes, but remember the Liberal Democrats? They used to be a viable party, seriously, and in that same 2001 election got 18.3% of the vote. Of course after 2010 they entered into a Coalition with the Conservatives which didn’t work out so well for them as they betrayed almost everything they stood for thereby making inevitable their eventual decline. And speaking of once relevant minor parties, that’s right, The United Kingdom Independence Party. In the 2015 general election UKIP garnered 12.7% of the vote, however after the result of the independence referendum the year after, their raison d'être was no more, and their support likewise crash-dived. So should we credit the rapid demise of these once third forces in British politics for the return of votes to the major parties, or should instead we just decide it’s because Jeremy Corbyn is totes amazeballs and everyone now adores him? For those keeping score at home there was also a 5.5% swing to the Tories for this same reason, but somehow that isn’t being interpreted as “Everyone loves Theresa” in the way the corresponding boost to Labour’s numbers are. The Conservatives registered their highest percentage of the vote, 42.4%, since Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 landslide but, apparently, this figure can be dismissed with an airy wave.

Although conspiracy theorists mostly talk rubbish, there is substance related to the Rockefellers on this topic, from the 2nd generation onwards, but to avoid the direction of conspiratorial paranoia, I'll start by giving credit where it is due. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of what became Exxon-Mobil and Chevron was green and practising recycling a century before those two words became the in-thing, even before he established the The Rockefeller Foundation, motivated by efficiency and social responsibility. Standard Oil used gasoline to fuel their machines while other companies dumped it into rivers or heaped it up as waste products. Rockefeller bought the Chesebrough Manufacturing Co. to create Vaseline. SO invested heavily in the gas and electric lighting businesses, as well as the Corn Products Refining Co., to connect the topic at hand.

In practice, he not only confirmed both the Agorist and Kropotkinite fear that horizontal collectivist integration and cooperative governance under a single influence, can result in vertical integration and monopoly formation (whether privately or worker-owned), but also showed why non-interfering states must integrate local and provincial legislation to evolve into huge nation-state level interference through trust-busting, when struggling competitors complain about entrepreneurial cunning in Cowboy Capitalism, as happened with Standard Oil, or violence and intimidation, as it did with the Cochise County Cowboys. Stronger competitors copy the monopolistic formula to the point of upsetting complaining competitors, the way Texaco, Shell and others did. With the status quo in place, there cannot be a free market, because the ruling class will dominate it as their resources dictate, not only by logical consequence, but as history has repeatedly shown.

In December 2016 the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party established a ALP Platform Committee and called for members to make a contribution. The Isocracy Network, although non-party political, has members who are also members of the ALP and thus presented the following submission on the first four topics chosen by the committee. A summary version of our contribution includes: (a) removal of taxes on productive activities and a shift to resource rents, (b) public expenditure and employment on new infrastructure, especially renewable energy and communications, (c) public expenditure on skills and training in such new infrastructure, especially renewable energy, and information and communications technology, and transport, (d) objective harm minimisation policies in substance abuse and decriminalisation of person drug offenses, (e) extending public transport infrastructure and resocialisation of the network.

There is a relationship, almost invariably overlooked, between the proposals of land-value tax as an economic policy, and proportional representation as a political policy. Both policies have, across the world, a diverse range of small and independent groups of advocates. These groups tend to be populated by didactic boffins, people with great expertise on matters of tax policy and electoral systems, two topics which traditionally bore normal people senseless. Yet the wisest among them understand their deep importance. For whilst the advocates of these policies have had difficulties in inspiring the public at large, they are founded in two-deeply seated principles that are widely shared; fairness and justice. These idea are worth exploring.

Over the past four decades the world has been plunged into an economic dark age. While the rich get richer and tighten their grip on power, the poor find it increasingly difficult to survive and more importantly find themselves excluded from the institutions that make the laws. It is no accident after forty years of this failed experiment the level of disillusionment with the political and economic process is rapidly increasing.

During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the Age of Revolution dramatically changed the role of the state. The state was primarily the mechanism by which those with power and wealth maintained that power and wealth in the most brutal fashion. The Age of Revolution loosened the grip the ruling class held on the state and forced the state to take an active interest in the welfare of its citizens. The state was transformed from an instrument whose primary purpose was to ensure those who exercised power continued to exercise power into an instrument by which the basic human needs of its citizens were met. The provision of public education, public health, the building of public infrastructure, the growth of a dual economy where the public sector competed with the private sector, the introduction of laws and regulations to protect working people and the introduction of social security benefits for the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed and single parents occurred as a direct result of mass upheavals. The deaths and imprisonment of millions of people around the globe was the price that was paid by those who demanded the inalienable rights and liberties they believed they were born with.

Okay, so I have a bone to pick with this popular image.

I know everyone likes it, but it is deeply troubling. My main problem with this is that it presents us with a Balance Fallacy or an inverse false dilemma wherein the truth is only to be found between two extremes. From Rational wiki, which does a nice job explaining why this is a problem:

"While the rational position on a topic is often between two extremes, this cannot be assumed without actually considering the evidence. Sometimes the extreme position is actually the correct one, and sometimes the entire spectrum of belief is wrong, and truth exists in an orthogonal direction that hasn't yet been considered."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy

Philosophically speaking this is where the problem of finding a true source on political matters is problematic.

Did the lack of even an alliance of convenience between Labor and the Greens result in the re-election of the Liberal-National Coalition in the last Federal election? If the result had been different, what would Australia look like now? How would Australia's political parties respond to such a change? Is there sufficient justification for such an alliance to exist in the future? These are questions that can only be answered with a very careful consideration of the facts at hand, and with equal diligence in the more predictive and prescriptive aspects.

The 2016 Federal Election

The last Australian Federal election was held in July 2016, after a lengthy eight-week campaign and a double-dissolution. All major newspapers, with the exception of the Sunday Age, recommended a return of the LNP government under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull, who had taken the leadership from the deeply unpopular Abbott government from September the year prior, and was a first term government. The major issues of the campaign were Labor's policies on negative gearing, concerns over the privitisation of Medicare, and debates over the political and economic management of the last Labor government. The election resulted in a two-party preferred swing against the government of 3.13% and a marginal victory on TPP overall (50.36% vs 49.64%), with the loss of 14 seats (LNP 76 seats, ALP 69 seats, GRN 1, XEN 1, KAT 1, Ind 2). On primary vote, the LNP lost 3.51% (42.04%), the ALP gained 1.35% (34.73%), the GRN gained 1.58% (10.23%), and XEN (new party) gained 1.85%.

The entire beginning of the year has felt like mourning as we say goodbye to one of the most charismatic, intelligent and dignified standard-bearers of Violent American Imperialism in history, and hand the keys to the castle over to a tantrum-throwing man-child that no one took seriously until it was too, too late.

There are lessons to be learned in our complacency, and we should all be looking for ways to pry our brains open for them. We cannot go on the way we have up until now, thinking that justice and equality and good ideas are in any way inevitable. We made, collectively as a society, a very serious mistake that came in two parts. The first part was that we failed to field a meaningful alternative to the status quo at a time when the status quo was being openly questioned by the electorate on both sides. Donald Trump represents an ascendancy of hyperconservative radicalism, and the milquetoast liberal-centrism of Hillary Clinton was no antidote. Even Bernie Sanders’ modest reformism, backed with admittedly fiery language, was nothing more than advocating a shift toward something like what Europe has prospered under for decades. The Overton window in America simply isn’t open wide enough to see all the way to a radical-left alternative.

Australia Day, the commemoration of the landing of the British First Fleet in Sydney Cove is a day of division. Whilst a large majority of Australians feel positive about the day, that number falls to less than a quarter of indigenous Australians and, currently, only 15% want the day changed, following the lead of the Fremantle City Council. Barnaby Joyce, parading his typical level of knowledge and sensitivity in public affairs indicated his opposition to changing the date.

The choice of date in itself is a rather strange beast. It does not, of course, represent first European contact with Australia. That was when the Dutchman navigator and colonialist Willem Jansz landed on the western coast of Cape York Peninsula in 1606 which resulted in violent conflicts. It certainly doesn't represent the founding of Australia as a country, that was, of course, Federation, on January 1st, 1901. It doesn't even represent the establishment of the colony of New South Wales - that occurred on February 7, 1776 with a formal proclamation, although that had already been down as a claim (rather than a reality) by James Cook on August 22, 1770 at Possession Island in Torres Strait.

What caught my attention was her face with the classic lines full of the past burdens and memory pains, a woman in her forties with a slender face and agonies of a thousand years.

My first encounter with Amina during the English class has triggered my curiosity to know her story, and although I met a lot of persons and heard a lot of stories of refugees’ tragedies, Amina and her story were the most important to me.

Amina was a lady who volunteered at the camp and contributed in spreading happiness among the refugees. We always talked and I had a few questions that needed answers on how she came and the reasons why she had to take the risk to cross the sea and apply for asylum. I was hesitant in the beginning, but eventually I suggested to listen to her story as if we had interviews, she was pleased and perhaps she felt that someone was there to listen to her agonies and we had this interview: