Global (supranational) coup underway?

[Obamot]

We're not short-sighted, can you take screenshots with a slightly smaller font please? THANKS..

PS: sorry, these edits take too long.
And it becomes unreadable on a laptop in portrait mode.
I would have done my best...

[Obamot]

The ravages of "Advice firms in Australia itou?
Original lighting:

IMG_20230413_114505.png (636.71 KiB) Viewed 855 times

Here they are. Vice-chancellors, university directors and creatures with nameless and insignificant titles (MPs, half-MPs, sub-MPs), a whole cavalcade of parasitic creatures to be sterilized, eager to pursue another stupid idea. Australian universities do not want to miss out on the military-industrial education complex, however compelling its dangers. With the war-inspired AUKUS security pact promising the dismantling of the Australian budget to the tune of A$368 billion over three decades, a corrupt establishment promises to get worse.

The AUKUS distraction couldn't have come at a better time. The tertiary sector in Australia is becoming increasingly deadly, marked by cost cutting, rampant casualization and heavy teaching and workloads for those struggling in the educational trenches.

In a recent article by the Guardian Australia higher education reporter, an academic, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of institutional retaliation, compared the modern Australian university to a supermarket. The students were the customers filing through the automatic checkouts; staff, increasingly rendered useless, were easily disposable.

The stories have been familiar for years, even as the offenses of university management continue unabated: tutors are underpaid to read and grade assignments properly; virtually non-existent job security; suppression of academic freedom and criticism of appalling management practices. Given the pathological secrecy in which universities operate, it is virtually impossible to obtain essential data shedding light on class sizes, staff-to-student ratios and contracts with private business interests.

But although Australia's university sector has proven unsustainable, unprincipled and unsightly, individuals such as Catriona Jackson, CEO of Universities Australia, are looking for new frontiers. Last year, Universities Australia's submission to the Strategic Defense Review almost begged to link universities to the country's defense needs. All the Ministry of Defense and the Australian Defense Force had to do was ask.

As the Australian Financial Review reported at the time, "Universities must be prepared to respond adaptively and effectively to a clear demand signal from defense in terms of manpower requirements - at the both in skills and numbers - as well as in technology and materials.”

How lucky, then, that AUKUS came awkwardly. For Jackson, the principles of education are less important than inflated business opportunities or, to use his jargon, marketing. Distant from the learning process itself, ignorant of the delivery of lessons and the classroom, she sees this security pact of war-making as rich in promise. "It's labour, labour, labour," she told her Sky News host Kieran Gilbert. “We don't just need nuclear physicists, although we need some of them and it's a very specialized profession. In almost all areas of human activity, we need capacity building, so engineers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, pretty much everyone.

Obviously hearing the bells of war around the corner, Jackson travels to Washington for meetings with national security officials from the US State Department and the National Science Foundation. She hopes the number of Australian university partnerships will grow, "with more than 10 formal partnerships already in place with other institutions around the world". Her message to the US capital, however, will focus on "developing the capacity [of Australian universities] to deliver, including providing skilled workers and world-class research and development."

Some publications have also exhaled chauvinistic cheers over the new role of the Australian service industry. The Aussie, one of Rupert Murdoch's best moss and bile rags, is consistently reliable in that regard. The newspaper's higher education editor, Tim Dodd, in a March contribution, posed two questions to stakeholders in the university sector: if Australia's universities had ever played such a vital role in national defense as they do would probably do over the next two decades in building nuclear-powered submarines? Would they even want to be involved?

Throughout his article, Dodd seems to think that a university system untied to the defense establishment is a morally questionable thing. In doing so, he betrays his ignorance of those wise words of US Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright, who warned that "by lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails in its higher purposes."

Dodd can simply observe that "in the post-war period universities were still not essential to defense programs". AUKUS and the nuclear submarine program had been a game changer. "Australia is now embarking on a huge program to build, operate and maintain nuclear-powered submarines and a clear goal is sovereign capability." Overall, it was “a key national priority that universities are right to give their full support. Their support is essential.

Leaving aside such mundane nonsense as "sovereign capacity" - the technology, expertise, control and guidance over this promised new machine will still be directed from Washington - the sentiments are clear. The military-industrial-academic complex is something to celebrate. There are, for example, "other parts of AUKUS" that will involve "our top universities" in areas such as "advanced research in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies".

Oddly, Dodd takes the issue of academic freedom the wrong way: expressing a choice in favor of the blatant war drums of AUKUS is something that should be one for academics. If he had any idea of ​​despotic academic environments, he would be aware that academics, however they agree, will have little say in the matter. Distant and distant leaderships, inducted without reason into administrative towers, will make these decisions for them; the only real freedom of expression will be exercised by opponents of the measure.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently teaches at RMIT University. E-mail : bkampmark@gmail.com

UNIVERSITIES AND THE AUKUS MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Sources: Front-Sud / + various

Gonna need a revolution

[Christophe]

With a common Europe of defence, we would be independent of the other powers.

Comrade nostalgia?

The Europe of common defense was the principle of the SS which could welcome under the same banner very different nations...
There were even Muslim SS... (in the corner of Turkey or the Balkans, it seems to me...)

Probably a deep fake: