December 6, 2012
Let us venture to advance another truth, a truth useful to the Minister himself. There exists among the officers of the Marine, an intractable esprit de corps, a pretended point of honour, equally false and arrogant, which leads them to consider as an insult to the whole navy, the discovery of one guilty individual. This inadmissible principle, which is useful only to insignificance, to intrigue, to people the least worthy ...
November 29, 2012
YINDJIBARNDI ABORIGINAL CORPORATION MEDIA STATEMENT—Thursday 29 November 2012 http://yindjibarndi.org.au/ YINDJIBARNDI WANT SOLUTION TO FMG DEBACLE Yindjibarndi Elder Bruce Woodley joins Sue Singleton, Brad Goode and Kerry Savas in telling the ‘inconvenient’ truth about Fortescue’s (FMG) behind-the-scenes tactics to divide Yindjibarndi society and destroy our culture. We thank him for his courage, as we do the others, and all those who might follow. We especially hope that Bruce’s peers ...
November 1, 2012
Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation—BULLETIN http://yindjibarndi.org.au/ Wednesday 31 October 2012 No amount of corporate spin, bulldust or threats can save Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) from the continuing revelations of whistleblowers and freedom on information documents that show the under-handed tactics and bullying they ply for profit. * Today Solicitor Kerry Savas, who spent more than a year representing the interests of the splinter Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, told The National Indigenous Times that the ...
October 8, 2012
“Before contacting EY/Ethics, we encourage you to consider whether or not you can directly raise your concern with someone at Ernst & Young. If you do not feel comfortable doing so, or do not know whom to contact, you can make a report to Ernst & Young on this Web site or alternatively by calling your local EY/Ethics Hotline number.” About EY/Ethics Given the experience of James Mandel and Cathal ...
July 30, 2012
It’s become part of the Australian vernacular, these words of the One Nation founder and xenophobe, Pauline Hanson. “Please explain”, the catch cry that irritated an entire parliament and Australian public may have seemed ill founded, but certainly made many a person think. Now, in the words of that infamous personality, I am calling upon Ernst & Young to please explain this: On 9 May 2002, the day after Pat ...
July 19, 2012
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera One of the first Communist texts I read, following the French edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, also known as, The Little Red Book, was Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables. For those purists among my colleagues who may object to me referring to Les Miserables as a Communist text, I offer the following in ...
July 14, 2012
PT Freeport Indonesia’s newly appointed president director, Rozik B. Soetjipto, announced this week that the company is willing to renegotiate its contract with the Indonesian government for the continuation of its giant Grasberg mine complex and for the expansion of underground mining at the site. In interviews with the Jakarta Post this week, Rozik stressed Freeport Indonesia is racing to secure and build massive underground mining facilities ahead of the ...
July 12, 2012
Dr. Janice Harper has graciously agreed to her paper being republished on Blak and Black, for which we are most grateful. This is the paper referred to in the post To fight the grizzly or run: a comparison of fortunes. More of Dr. Harper’s writing and insights can be found at the Huffington Post, her professional website and her blog The Chocolate Covered Kitchen. Please take the time to read this article and her ...
July 8, 2012
Business is no place for friends and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Canberra, London, New York or Moscow. Whilst Cathal Lyons as the Managing Partner of Operations and Chief Financial Officer of the Ernst & Young CIS Practice with his office in Moscow, probably knew this maxim, he learned the lesson first hand when he found himself marginalized by the Big4 accounting firm. The E&Y CIS Practice includes various ...
July 5, 2012
Nataraja dances, his right foot supported by a crouching figure, his left foot elegantly raised. Of his four arms, one swings downwards, pointing to the raised foot; another with palm held up signals, “Do not fear!” In his other hands he holds aloft a drum and a flame. The river Ganga sits in his hair. A Cobra uncoils from his lower right forearm, and the crescent moon and a skull ...
June 27, 2012
Everywhere, people attach powerful emotions to the deaths of others and feel the need to dispose of the bodily remains of the dead in a suitable manner. In Australia, there is ancient evidence for such rites of disposal. Human remains recovered from Lake Mungo dated to 30,000 years or possibly much older were buried with red ochre and carefully positioned for burial. Similar mortuary practices have been recorded ethnographically and ...
May 31, 2012
It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by ...
May 9, 2012
Fragments from the Alfoxden Notebook There he would stand In the still covert of some rock, Or gaze upon the moon until its light Fell like a strain of music on his soul And seemed to sink into his very heart. Why is it we feel So little for each other, but for this, That we with nature have no sympathy, Or with such things as we have no ...
April 29, 2012
Yet another explanation needed by Ernst & Young … In the words of a renowned Australian xenophobe, please explain, Ernst & Young. First, you employ an Indigenous Australian man (aka ‘Pat’) to work in your Canberra office, having sourced him through your own recruiting head-hunter Tanya Taylor. He leaves of his own accord to return to the ACT Public Service. During his first tenure as an ACT Public Servant he ...
April 14, 2012
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought of golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would lay these cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven, W.B. Yeats. Many, ...
April 7, 2012
Media have divided the working class and stereotyped young African-American males as gangsters or drug dealers. As a result of such treatment, the media have crushed youths’ prospects for future employment and advancement. The media have focused on the negative aspects of the black community (e.g. engaging in drug use, criminal activity, welfare abuse) while maintaining the cycle of poverty that the elite wants. Balkaran, S., 1999, The Yale Political ...
March 14, 2012
Complicity takes many forms, as discussed in posts by both Bakchos and me. Many believe that silent complicity is the least culpable, but to my mind if the silence enables the perpetrator of the wrongdoing to continue causing harm, then the silence is of a gross kind. An example of such silent complicity allowing continuing harm is described by Steven Miles generating discussion in both the Lancet and via his ...
March 7, 2012
This case arises from the petitioners’ claim that Azzam Rahim was detained, tortured, and killed by “the security forces of the Palestinian Authority” in late 1995, around the time the Palestinian Authority assumed responsibility for certain territories pursuant to internationally brokered peace agreements. The Palestinian Authority had its genesis in the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (“PLO”) agreed that it was: time to put ...
March 1, 2012
Crimes against humanity, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions — all of those human rights norms are defined by actions. They’re not defined by whether the perpetrator is a human being or a corporation or another kind of entity. Paul Hoffman representing the 12 Nigerian petitioners in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum The issue in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum an issue central to the lives of many indigenous people ...
February 22, 2012
Invaded by Indonesia in 1961, West Papua is the crisis on Australia’s doorstep. The conflict generated by the usurpation of the former Dutch protectorate is not recognized as anything other than a separatist movement by those in power in the international community, but it is so very much more. Since the Act of No Choice in 1969 in which 1025 West Papuans voted under extreme duress unanimously in favour of ...
