Describing the US-Australia alliance as “unbreakable”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he hoped the junior ally would partner with America on “some of the most pressing foreign policy challenges of our time” including “Iran’s unprovoked attacks on international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz”.
Mike Pompeo’s press-ganging of Australia, one of its few remaining useful idiot allies, into a crazy, navy-battle with Iran is upstaged by Trump’s stupidity, surely the top “pressing foreign policy challenge of our time”, Monday, as the USA’s tariff war provokes a Chinese burn.
Beijing lets China’s currency slip below seven renminbi to the US dollar.
It’s a dip in value not seen since 2008. Instantly, $38 billion is wiped off the Australian Stock Exchange, Monday; the worst day of the year for our stock traders. Stock markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong where trade is troubled by impertinent serfs wanting independence, fall 2 percent. Futures markets suggest Wall Street will open lower, too.
Even worse, Trump’s kamikaze trade war with China is based on his peerless ignorance and delusion. Blatant falsehoods and misconceptions lead him to blow up world trade in his crusade to make America great again.
“Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars’ worth of goods & products,” he tweets in May. “These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.”
They don’t. But no-one can explain that to Trump. China is as likely to hand over billions of yuan for Trump’s tariffs as Mexico is to pay for a border wall. Instead, tariffs fall on American importers of Chinese goods, who then put up prices to American consumers. Every time Trump raises tariffs, he raises costs on families and businesses.
Eager to divert the Donald, Trump’s helpers urge on an unwinnable war with Iran. Seventieth Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a former CIA Director briefly, (January 2017 to April 2018) who is now intelligence Czar by default of the most irrational, least cerebral White House in US history, flies in, Sunday, to dine with fellow evangelical weirdo, and Trump fan-boy “Gung-Ho” Scott Morrison. Pompeo lies about Iran. Suckers us into a tanker war. It works.
“Like us the UK are equally alarmed by the increasing tensions in the Gulf region and they also strongly condemn Iran’s attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Oman, given some of their vessels have been subject to attack,” Reynolds reads aloud. Defence Ministers now simply copy and paste US spin. Presto! Instant press release. In reality, Minister Reynolds, the attacks are a response to the US persuading Britain to seize Grace 1. It is a manufactured crisis.
And it is also a folly. Trump’s Gilbertian Gulf Protection Force will fail, just as its predecessor failed thirty years ago.
Reynolds should buck the Coalition trend of ignoring expert research or history or common sense and at least read Robert Fisk who reported 30 years ago on his experience of the ill-fated first tanker war,
“What afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burnt the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch.
On the helicopter flight deck … only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.
Who cares if the last tanker war in the 1980s ended in disaster? When our great and powerful friend tells us to jump, we just ask how high. Where are the details of the flotilla of the willing? What is the battle plan? In the 1980s, Iran simply had to place a few antique mines in the water and the thin-hulled US vessels were in trouble.
A US tanker, The Bridgeton, hit a mine 24 July 1987 but was able to limp home followed by a clutch of US warships forced to steam behind for their own protection like a gaggle of ducklings behind their wounded mother duck, much to the amusement of the Iranian navy. The American humiliation will not be forgotten. Except by News Corp.
Father Paul Kelly of The Australian bloviates glowingly of a “declaration by Pompeo that the US expects all nations with commercial interests in free navigation in the Straits of Hormuz to participate in intervention against Iran to protect the waters. This has been put as a general US appeal, not an alliance issue. But past experience suggests if the US assembles a broad coalition of nations then Australia will be involved.
No-one on the ABC and no-one in government points out that there are one or two tiny hitches. The US president and Commander in Chief, Donald Trump, will not, cannot even read a briefing paper. Staffers claim he does not believe in objective reality. He gets his policy ideas from Fox News. Pompeo was brought in to clean up the mess. His job, as the New York Times puts it is to travel the world cleaning up Trump’s messes.
Trump has no clue what he is doing. He fires anyone who disagrees with him. Pompeo, who prides himself on being a Donald-whisperer is the last man standing of his original staff but Pompeo also believes in The Rapture. Iran must be crushed as part of God’s plan to send Jesus to return to a greater Israel. Trump’s current trade war with China, meanwhile, may bring world recession – yet no effort is spared to normalise the maniac.
Whilst the CIA found evidence that Saudi Crown Prince MBS ordered Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Pompeo told journalists there was no direct reporting that linked the prince to the order to kill Khashoggi.
Naturally, it’s a secret meeting to best serve the interests of transparency in a world run on by rules-based order. A further secret meeting follows with the PM in which he will eagerly volunteer to do anything Mike says.
Over 700,000 Australians struggle to survive on $40 dollars a day yet our government will provide $200 billion over 10 years for Australia’s military to support US wars, says the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. (IPAN)
“Many are homeless, going without food and unable to pay for basic necessities like gas, electricity, education and health”. The Coalition’s recent gift is $73 billion in tax free contracts to multinational weapons manufacturers.
Australia, our ABC dutifully reports, is considering a “serious and complex” request from the US to help protect oil shipments against Iranian interference in the Persian Gulf. Reynolds repeats the lie of our independence.
“We will ultimately as we always do, decide what’s in our sovereign interests.” Or whatever the US tells us to do. The word “lockstep” is used, a step above Turnbull’s image of mutually incapacitating affliction – “joined at the hip”.
The US peddles the lie that its allies have a say in its tanker wars. It’s visiting us just to check with Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne, who have no veto over ScoMo’s PM’s final call. Of course we yearn to be part of another illegal coalition of the willing. The US has not learnt a single lesson from its past disasters in the 1980s. Nor have we.
Nor has Britain, whose delusion that it is still a great naval power, helps it let itself be conned into piracy. Its seizure of Grace 1, an Iranian tanker, off Gibraltar, is illegal. It violates Part III of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Iran responds tit for tat. It seizes a British tanker, The Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz, again an illegal act, but with due provocation. It is irrelevant that the tanker is attempting to breach sanctions by delivering oil to Syria. Yet there has been not a whisper of protest from our invisible Foreign Minister Payne or US toady, ScoMo.
Craig Murray, former head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and alternate head of the U.K. Delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is disgusted. He both negotiated, and drafted parts of, the Protocol that enabled the Convention to come into force.
“The hypocrisy of arresting the Iranian ship and then threatening war when Iran commits precisely the same illegal act in retaliation is absolutely sickening,” is his informed judgement. Expect a different spin from Admiral ScoMo.
Donald Trump may never grasp the gravity of the events but his minders know that the collapse of the crucial international law on passage through straits would have devastating effects on the world economy.
No-one in our MSM, apart for Phillip Adams’ guest, Christopher Dickey of The Daily Beast on ABC’s Late Night Live with 350,000 listeners a week points out that the Brits have found themselves the pawns of the Americans. Now in deep trouble, fabulously inept, new PM, Boris Johnson and his government are left on their own to work it out.
An incremental war is brewing – as it did in September 1980 turning the straits of Hormuz into Exocet ally, leading to a full scale war in 1986 and the US backing Iraq against Iran including the contra scandal. 1987 Operation Earnest Will saw US vessels outwitted by Iran and ended in another humiliation for the Reagan administration.
Under Trump’s even more inept performances as Commander in Chief, Tanker war 2.0 will also end badly for America and for those allies foolish enough to tag along.
Perhaps our talented maritime experts in the Coalition will be asked to help lobby Iran to release the Stena Impero.
“Whose side are you on”, cries ScoMo & Co all week as he is forced to turn to internal politics and jeering at Labor. The PM and his motley crew, snipe at the Opposition with a new hyper-partisan, rallying cry. Morrison loves to pretend everything is black and white. No-one will ever accuse him of sophistication, complexity or depth.
Besides, ScoMo’s got to kick up a bit of dust to cover the Crown scandal which threatens to expose ministers and staff in organising junkets to woo whales (big gamblers) from China, where gambling is illegal, to Australia and then fast-track them through Immigration to Crown Casino and more, according to whistle-blower Roman Quaedvlieg.
Attorney-General the very Christian Porter is on to it. The scandal is handballed to Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) which has jurisdiction only over law enforcement and which is so underfunded it may well have to ask Crown to look into at least some parts of itself. In the meantime, the affair is punted off limits.
Because allegations have been referred to ACLEI, it’s not proper to comment, says Mathias Cormann with a straight face, reports The Monthly’s Paddy Manning. Above all the PM “is not aware of any of his ministers breaching ministerial standards”. Not aware? To The Greens’ Nick McKim, it’s a “pathetic” response. He says the referral to ACLEI is “convenient” – given it cannot investigate sitting politicians – and calls Porter’s stunts a “cover-up”.
McKim is right on the money. Crown, however, will not so easily be dealt with given its apparent scale and given that it follows a mini-series of rollicking scandals which includes grass-gate, where Jam Land’s endangered grasslands are given a good spray of Glyphosate herbicide, despite their protected status, a scandal Angus Taylor can’t defuse even with his top suggestion that we form a committee or something to look into nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is too expensive, takes too long to build and needs abundant water, as a series of past reviews have duly reported, but when you have no policy agenda and a cluster headache of scandals breathing down your neck, it may at least give you a breather. Or at least the Taylor family hopes so. Unhelpfully loitering the background are Reef-gate, Helloworld, Watergate and questions unanswered about a closed tender for security on Manus Island.
Crown, a big donor to both major parties, is even dubbed “The Vatican” because it is a law unto itself but although he hopes it can all be buried in a review, ScoMo throws a dead cat on the table. “Whose side are you on?” implies that Labor cannot be trusted or that the Opposition betrays the decent, quiet Australians who star in Coalition spin.
ScoMo’s politics sounds a lot like kids choosing sides in some playground game, although the least helpful thought bubble by a country mile this week has to go to troubled Terry Young, the Queensland LNP MP for Longman, who suggests in his first speech in the House of Representatives that schools should teach both sides of the climate change debate in school – to prevent them being “brainwashed with extreme left or right ideologies”.
Only it’s far more sinister. “Unfunded empathy”, is Morrison’s brave new taunt of the week. He sneers at Labor for showing compassion, he says we can’t afford – despite the IMF’s May report showing that Australian taxpayers subsidise fossil fuel industries by a whopping $29 billion a year. Raising New Start is small beer in comparison.
Yet “unfunded empathy” is worse than nonsense. It betrays Australia’s long tradition of egalitarianism and attacks the very heart of the social contract. It’s odd that a man that so publicly professes his religious faith does not seem to know the injunction that to give is to give and not to count the cost.
it’s OK for his Coalition spendthrifts to blow over $4 billion a year on Operation Sovereign borders, a fortune on paranoia, xenophobia.
“We believe what Australians believe.” Coach ScoMo tells his team they need to show voters they’re on their side when they jet home business class for their well-earned late winter break and to spend their electorate allowance.
What better way to divide a diverse, far-flung, failing nation state, less a democracy than a oligarchy, ruled by a rat-pack of business, mining, media, banking and gambling magnates? In its place, MPs exchange matey barbs on the banality of breakfast TV; leaders in the babel of much of our national conversation, where daily we run up the white flag in the battle to separate fact from fiction. For Facebook, a lie is just a demoted truth.
Facebook is in the gun for publishing Labor’s evil plan to bring in a death tax should it have won the May election. It’s fake news. “False” says an independent fact-checker. Yet the social medium’s executive and word weasel, Simon Milner says it’s something else. Not just fake news but also something a political party doesn’t care for.
“We do not agree that it is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false.”
Labor’s death tax is demoted not deleted. Communications Minister Paul Fletcher, a former Optus “Yes” man who, like his predecessor, Fifield, is one of our less communicative MPs, says he’s sympathetic to Facebook. It’s a remarkable turn-around for a government threatening to bring the socialists and keyboard warriors on Facebook and twitter to heel; slap them down with a huge new ACCC report. Fletcher is happy to parrot Milner.
“I don’t think we can dismiss reality – a digital platform is a different kind of business to a traditional media organisation that has editorial obligations.”
You’ve got to keep on the right side of this Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government. No good coming out from France and making a documentary about our dying reef as Hugo Clement discovers. No good bleating to Mistress Tingle on 7:30 Report “But I thought Australia was a democracy”. Anyone could see whose side Monsieur Clement was on.
Did the cheese-eating surrender monkey think he could inspect bleaching in the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef? Film protestors at Adani’s sacred site? Defile the miracle of our extra virgin clean coal which will be mined in our heroic, philanthropic mission to lift Indians out of indigence and into penury by charging them double the average tariff thanks to an MOU with crony Modi’s business-friendly government?
Of course we run him in. Clement and his three musketeers are manacled and man-handled by Queensland’s top cops, herded into divvy wagons, thrown in the slammer at Bowen for seven hours, and released on bail until September. Of course, police say nothing. Quiet Australians are everywhere these days. No fuss. Just the bare minimum “get in the van” and the obligatory “spread your legs” for the body cavity strip search.
“They didn’t give us an explanation when they arrested us and they are not giving us an explanation now when they are saying ‘OK, it is over’,” Clement shrugs. Later it emerges police are keen to press a charge of trespass. Trespass is big in the news this week and it’s going to help protect farmers’ rights to practise animal cruelty, without being exposed by animal activists.
Luckily, Quiet Australians are on the right side. Hardworking Australians, mum and dad investors, self-funded retirees are still on Team ScoMo and the side still includes heroic small business folk, frantic to spend their tax cuts to create another casual part-time job for another underpaid, over-worked employee. How good are jobs? At least this is the drama in the eternal sunshine of the PM’s spotless mind. Perhaps they are all on the same team.
Thank God for ScoMo! Our divisions are healed by the miracle of Pastor Scott’s sublime gift for leadership and nation-building. This week’s building includes attacking Albo, vilifying John Setka and mocking Labor for calling for an increase in the New Start pittance. “Unfunded empathy” sneers our PM. You can hear the word of God in him.
Being a Pentecostal prosperity-gospeller must be a huge inspiration to our man at the top. Paul is all over the need to choose sides and put down others when he says “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:11. Or when he tells the Galatians to “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2
But “The Bible is not a policy handbook”, says the old fox Morrison “faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda”. It’s another of his many acts of dissembling. It’s impossible, argues James Boyce, to understand the PM’s political career without considering his religion. Just as it is impossible to understand Pompeo’s foreign policy.
Uplifted, we soar above a barrage of scandals, “Grass-gate”, “Water-gate”, “Hello World” and even damning allegations of ministers of the Crown (Casino) who intercede to smooth the path of the holy high roller.
Whistle-blower and former Border Force Commissioner, Roman Quaedvlieg supports others who blow the whistle on how Crown Casino had a hotline to Immigration to help its whales (wealthy Chinese) avoid being beached by petty rules or having their thirty-five bags searched.
Quaedvlieg says Crown’s fast-tracking of Chinese VIP gamblers into Australia, including on private jets, raises major security concerns. By Tuesday, the issue seems to have been eclipsed by thought of a glorious new war with Iran. But you can’t blame the whistle-blower, although experts will be working on ways to silence or arrest him.
“My immediate reaction was there was an enhanced risk … Who was coming on these flights? They were being coordinated, organised, through junket operators which are widely known, not just in the public sphere, but certainly within the law enforcement context, as being a triad-affiliated,” Mr Quaedvlieg says.
Luckily, the matter will be taken care of by an underfunded and limited ACLEI task force. Nothing to see here. It’s the same winning formula with Liberal women who just won’t go to the police to get the run-around on rape claims.
Former NSW Premier, Nick Greiner’s sage counsel is keep calm and carry on undeterred by claims of a Liberal Party culture of bullying, misogyny and accusations of attempted rape – they are state affairs and they happened long ago
“They are not federal examples, they are historical and besides we have no knowledge of them.”
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