Web Editor : What is happening to our world? What is the legacy that we are leaving our children? Is war essential to economic well-being? This is obviously the case in the U.S.A. but must Australia follow blindly. And if it was true then why are we lied to about it. Oil is a global commodity and so Australia must be affected.
Editorial
John Howard's statement that Australian troops were in Iraq to help secure global oil supplies came as no surprise to critics of the war. Mr Howard must know his words play into the hands of cynics who said from the outset the invasion of Iraq was about oil.
The PM's speech could fuel anti-Western sentiment in some hard-line Muslim countries where the mantra is that US meddling in their affairs is a natural consequence of a desire to control Middle Eastern oil reserves.
The sands have shifted so often on the justification for the Iraq war that it is easy to forget where we started in 2003. We were told then the invasion was about ousting a dangerous dictator and preventing him developing weapons of mass destruction and unleashing them on the world. When it became clear WMDs didn't exist the ground shifted to make Iraq the battleground in the war on terrorism.
It has now been tweaked again to include the necessity to secure oil supplies.
We should all realise that there is nothing happening in federal politics at the moment that is not linked to the election.
Many Australians favour a swift withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Mr Howard may think he can shore up support for the war by linking it to petrol supplies. The selective leaking of the details of his speech to some newspapers appeared to be part of this deliberate political tactic.
The PM should be careful. His decision to so blatantly play fast and loose with a conflict where Australian lives are on the line every day could easily backfire. The current Australian Government has grown arrogant with power. It thinks that its beliefs will sway the majority of Australians to agree with them. God grant that they are wrong and the people are not so lulled into a sense of false security that they will follow blindly and apathetically.
Hopefully Abraham Lincoln was right when he said :
George Bush's ideology was made clear when he said :
But who in Australia is most affected? Could it be that we have been taught to believe that it is the motorist? Do we believe that a car or two is essential? Some suburban councils in Sydney insist that all home building applications in their area have at least two garages.
Our city is being constructed so that it is ever more difficult to live without a car. Schools are spread further and further apart. Vast shopping centres are forcing more and more small corner stores to close.
Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 tram systems in 45 cities in the U.S.A. (New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles to name a few) to be dismantled and replaced with GM buses... In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in U.S.A. district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter and fined $5,000.
Do the people have a say or are they manipulated by Governments (power), corporations (money) or media (brain washing).
Who profits—not the people.
The same thing is happening today, why can we not trust the people in power?
"Power corrupts,
Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
—Lord Acton 1834–1902
"In war, truth is the first casualty."
—Aeschylus, 525 BC–456 BC
This still applies, read on:
PM's War for Oil
July 06, 2007 12:00am
Melbourne Herald Sun
And so it goes, on and on. Bush and Blair want power and oil. Howard is under the delusion that he can be a big fish in his small pond, and he has succeeded up to now. He thinks the U.S.A. is both powerful and popular. He is right and he is wrong. American citizens are the most unpopular tourists in the world. Through John Howard Australian tourists are becoming ever less popular. We too may earn the description applied to the U.S.A forces stationed in Australia during World War 2. They had three faults. They were "Over sexed, over paid and over here."
And now the Nuclear Power Reactors!!!!
"You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."
We are not now a better world.
LET US CHANGE IT
"When the black and mortal blood of man has fallen to the ground...
who then can sing spells to call it back again?"
—Aeschylus, Agamemnon
