End the suffering in the greyhound racing industry

Greg McFarlane wants to End the suffering in the greyhound racing industry.

Greyhounds who make it to the racecourse commonly endure injuries and all are retired by the age of three or four. The reward most dogs get is a death before their fifth birthday.

The racing industry treats animals this way because it exploits and objectifies them to make money. It uses them for entertainment and profit, placing no value on their sentience.

This multi-billion dollar industry contributes to human suffering in other ways. It encourages gambling —which can be highly destructive, ruining lives and devastating families and communities.

Greyhound racing —in its present form —is not a sport in any real way. It is big business, with big cash rewards for those prepared to gamble.

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The Socialist Alliance opposes the greyhound racing industry.

It calls for an immediate end to government (and Labor opposition) support for the industry and enforce the ban on using live bait.

Emphasis Mine

Capitalism is the root of all evil.

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US finally agrees David Hicks is innocent

Richard Jackson writes that US finally agrees David Hicks is innocent.

Hicks’ problem with the media, he says, is that in the seven years he has been free, they continue to fixate on what he was doing in Afghanistan. Different media outlets continually tell him he has to answer this, before they will move on to other questions, such as his treatment at the hands of the US and Australia’s complicity in it.

Hicks spent five and a half years imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, after being sold by the Northern Alliance to the US military in Afghanistan in December 2001. While in US custody he was subject to an array of torture techniques, including, beatings, his right hand being fractured, being deprived of sleep through constant noise and lighting, being threatened with rape and torture, being isolated and put in solitary confinement, being shackled and put in stress positions.

He still suffers from his injuries, reeling off the problems: left knee, right elbow, wrists.

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Back in 2005 while discussing the differing treatment of Hicks, Habib, and the Danes, the following comment was made:

The different treatment can be explained by the capitalist media and Australian government's keenness to condemn a left-wing government such as Laos, while slavishly applauding the attempts of the US to run roughshod over an Australian citizens rights.

The media has to follow the government's script of who is an official enemy. Hicks has to be presumed to be guilty of something other than adolescent stupidty. By persisting in this line of questioning, the media avoids the hard questions of why the Australian government is negligent in the defence of Australian citizens' right when the US government, but will move heaven and earth when the Indonesian government.

The unspoken answer, as always, is the sacrosant American Alliance. Everything is sacrificed upon the altar for this false god.

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Pepperoni Turns Partisan

Mark Thoma asks Why are Republicans in the grips of "Big Pizza"? in response to Paul Krugman noting that Pepperoni Turns Partisan.

At a still deeper level, health experts may say that we need to change how we eat, pointing to scientific evidence, but the Republican base doesn’t much like experts, science, or evidence. Debates about nutrition policy bring out a kind of venomous anger … that is all too familiar if you’ve been following the debate over climate change.

Pizza partisanship, then, sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. It is, instead, a case study in the toxic mix of big money, blind ideology, and popular prejudices that is making America ever less governable.

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Here we have the profit motive driving pizza companies to promote a certain ideology (of individualism) that is detrimental to the health of their customers. This ideology has captured a political party through money and support. Thus, the state is bent to supporting the pizza companies.

Individualism is not the problem, but the profit motive. Individualism can be constructed to grow healthy human beings.

The laws of motion of Capitalism forbid the pizza companies from acting in any other way. Under Capitalism, they continually grow profits in order to survive. Not to do so results in destruction.

We must change how society operates in order to avoid these problems.

Change requires overcoming the perverted ideologies, and comfortable prejudices.

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How Higher Education Perpetuates Intergenerational Inequality

Mark Thoma writes that there is Bad news for those who propose education as the solution to inequality as Tim Taylor decribes How Higher Education Perpetuates Intergenerational Inequality.

The effects of these patterns on inequality of incomes in the United States are clearcut: higher income families are better able to provide financial and other kinds of support for their children, both as they grow up, and when it comes time to attend college, and when it comes time to find a job after college. In this way, higher education has become a central part part of the process by which high-income families can seek to assure that their children are more likely to have high incomes, too.

And in Australia, the idea of equal access to higher education has eroded away to a phantom. I was the beneficiary of free university education. Now, young people now longer have the same opportunities as my generation did.

The higher education sector is now seen as a major export driver as students from developing countries are stripped of their families' hard earned cash and given dubious qualifications. This is part of Australia's version of imperialism.

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