How to stop greyhound savagery

Simple way to end the barbaric culture of greyhound racing … Britain’s UKIP in disintegration … War crimes in Yemen: but don’t mention Australian involvement … Media corrupted in New York and Australia … Festival of Dangerous Ideas – 2 … Great Crashing Bores continued

How to stop greyhound savagery

There is a simple way to clean up the corrupt, barbaric and utterly disreputable greyhound racing industry. It’s so simple – enforce the laws of the land.
Here’s how to go about it. Form a multi-agency task force from the NSW organised crime squad, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Federal Police and the RSPCA.
Then start visiting registered greyhound owners and breeders at their properties on the NSW South Coast, Central Coast and North Coast as well as inland centres around Cowra, Dubbo, Orange, Albury, Armidale and Tamworth.
Take a search warrant and seize tax and business records, documents relating to the birth, death and burial of any greyhounds and all betting records.
While ATO auditors are finding out when owners/breeders last paid tax, RSPCA inspectors can search the property for any signs of mass graves of greyhounds which were executed because they had broken down on the track or failed as potential race winners.
If this law enforcement approach is adopted, the corrupt elements in the greyhound industry will shut up shop and the barbarity will be over.
Meanwhile, genuine dog lovers will be able to breed greyhounds as companion animals for themselves, their friends and other people. They would be free to enter their best racing dogs on selected NSW tracks, interstate, New Zealand or Asia.
After the greyhound gulag clean-up, the same teams – with the addition of investigators from AUSTRAC* (the Australian Transaction Reporting and Analysis Centre) – should turn their attention to the banking, insurance, real estate and “wealth creation” sectors.
*AUSTRAC’s stated mission is to crack money laundering, major crime and tax evasion but it seems little more than a Canberra-based office full of very expensive computers and paper shufflers.
See my Crikey piece on this here:

ALP goes greyhound sniffing

To its shame, the NSW ALP has hitched itself to the pro-greyhound industry lobbyists and their well-funded campaign against any ban.
Every so-called ALP “reformer” tells me that the Labor Party must end its “corrupt” links to the trade unions before it will become electable. Large parts of the union bureaucracy – not the long-suffering members – are endemically corrupt but their scale of corruption is miniscule compared to the spivs hiding out in the rural gulags for racing dogs.
There isn’t a single vote in Labor’s current support for greyhound racing: most people in the industry vote National; next election they will probably switch their vote to One Nation; they never vote Labor.
Yet Sydney inner-city voters have already turned Green and elected two MPs in Balmain and Newtown. After Labor’s greyhound betrayal, the swing to the Greens will continue.

UK “Kippers” start to disintegrate

After England and Wales voted to leave the European Union (EU) at the referendum in July, the mainstream media said that Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) was surging towards taking power.
There were blood-curdling prophecies that UKIP was a fascist party on the march. The “Mother Country” was moving towards fascism with “Kippers” leading the way.

Farage and James
Farage and James

That was then, this is now. In just three months, UKIP is collapsing like a deck of cards and I learn from the mainstream media that it marks the “beginning of the end” for the racist group.
What’s happened? Farage stood down as leader a few days after the Brexit vote on June 23 and his declaration of “Independence Day”. A woman, Diana James, became the new leader. She lasted 18 days in the job and then resigned.
New leadership contenders have now been involved in a punch-up at the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Farage has stepped back into the leader’s job to limit the disintegration.
Farage’s movement was nothing more than an expression of the volatile anger of England’s petty-bourgeois scum, mainly disillusioned Home County Tories and the dregs of Thatcherism.
For the moment, the xenophobic “Kippers” and retired colonels have been driven into the margins of politics and the lurid spectre of fascism conjured by sections of the mass media has abated.
Will their views disappear forever? Probably not.

Oz-linked war crimes in Yemen

When Saudi Arabian warplanes bombed a funeral in Yemen last week 140 mourners were killed in what was immediately declared a war crime.
But certain facts went unreported, namely that the Saudi-led war on Shi’ite rebels in Yemen is directed by Australian defence personnel.
They are now private contractors hired at colossal salaries to direct the slaughter of the Houthis who are fighting to restore Yemen’s independence.
Canberra has turned a blind eye to the involvement of Australian mercenaries in the American-backed aggression.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has asked UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon for those responsible for the attack to be held accountable for war crimes.
“Not only Saudi Arabia, but also those who have supported the aggression by the Saudi-led coalition against Yemeni people should be held accountable for the war crimes perpetrated in Yemen over the past year and a half,” Zarif said.
By choosing to side with the Washington, Riyadh and Tel Aviv in the deepening Middle East imbroglio, Malcolm Turnbull’s government, with bipartisan support from Labor’s Bill Shorten, is dragging Australia into a disaster zone with disastrous political and economic consequences.

Corruption of the media

The US media is claiming a “scoop” over senior journalists writing paid and unpaid fluff for their favourite politicians.
Is that really “news”? It’s being going on in Australia for decades.
Maggie Haberman is the American journalist who has been “outed” in emails leaked by a whistleblower at the heart of the Democratic Party machine.
The emails reveal that Ms Haberman, a former Politico reporter now covering the US presidential election for the august New York Times, is regarded as a “friendly journalist” with a great record for “teeing up” stories for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
An internal email from the Democrat campaign team said: “We have has [sic] a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for reengageing [sic] the beat press that covers HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton], for this we think our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.”
The fact that the email is written so illiterately only adds to my belief in its authenticity. What’s more, Ms Haberman and The New York Times won’t comment.
Other emails listed the names of “surrogates” and “progressive helpers” at the main print, radio and TV networks. They were all contacted and they all helped with friendly media coverage. Some were paid while others were not
A former newspaper colleague who went to the “dark side” and became a public relations wallah once told me that his company kept a list of Sydney journos detailing what stories they could be trusted to write.
My name was on the list too, but it was clearly marked that I was “unfriendly” to approaches made on behalf of clients.
The lesson for young journalists is to break your own stories and don’t accept tailored stories from vested interests, be they business or political.
Use professional spin-doctors but only to check information – never let them use you!

From poacher to gamekeeper

It is not uncommon for Australian journalists to switch from the media to politics. The cross-fertilisation is a fact of life and entirely over-board.
ABC Canberra political correspondent Mark Simkin gave up the National Press Gallery to join then prime Tony Abbott and is now with Malcolm Turnbull.
In Macquarie Street, ABC state reporter Ben Wilson transferred from the gallery in the mid-2000s to become communications director for former NSW premier Morris Iemma.
What ABC journalist is currently being courted by the NSW Opposition to join the next ALP administration? The money on offer is double what the corporation pays and if the journalist has a mortgage and young family then the package is enticing.
It becomes a significant problem if, like Ms Haberman (see above), the pursued journalist becomes embedded with one party and one leader and the coverage on the national broadcaster becomes skewed in one political direction.
I promise future updates, particularly if reports become less and less even-handed.

Festival of Dangerous Ideas. A new series – 2

Tony Abbott, former prime minister, talks about the four greatest influences on his life – philosopher and political activist B.A. Santamaria, Cardinal George Pell, Sir Prince Philip and Alan Jones. Don’t miss this intellectually challenging, ground-breaking and mind-opening event. Gender equality facilitators: Senator Eric Abetz, Senator Cory Bernardi, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine. Book now to avoid disappointment.

Great Crashing Bores – 17

I’m sick to death of the nanny state. I can’t even have a drink at the pub when I want to. It’s ridiculous. The politicians have restricted the hours that pubs can sell me a beer. I can’t even go to the off-licence and buy some cans of beer after midnight. Why not? It’s the nanny state again. Mind you, I don’t drink beer any more and I stopped going to pubs 10 years ago. I have my own bar at home. I designed it myself and put up photos of my racehorses after they won Group 1 races. I like to sit on my own having a few coldies, getting pissed and thinking about the good old days. That’s what life’s all about.
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