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The Choice: A Global Family or a Funeral Pyre

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The Obscene Arithmetic

Andrew Klein 20th November 2025

Let us speak in the only language the architects of our ruin seem to understand: numbers.

· To end world hunger by 2030: $267 billion per year (United Nations estimate).

· Global military expenditure in 2023: $2.24 trillion (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

· Cost of Australia’s AUKUS submarine program: A$368 billion over 30 years.

The math is not complicated. It is criminal. We are not facing a scarcity of resources. We are witnessing a scarcity of moral courage, a deliberate choice to fund instruments of death over the fundamental right to life. This is not an accounting error; it is a value judgment passed by a global elite upon the rest of humanity.

The Two Governing Principles: Family vs. Extraction

Beneath these numbers lie two opposing forces governing our world.

The Family Principle is the ancient, foundational law of human survival and flourishing. In a family—whether bound by blood or by chosen covenant—the well-being of one is the concern of all. The strong protect the vulnerable. Resources are shared to meet need. No child goes hungry while another feasts. This principle, scaled to a global level, would mean treating every human life as inherently valuable and organizing our economies to ensure its preservation and dignity.

The Extraction Principle is the diseased logic of the gilded rentier class—the billionaires, the arms dealers, the political enablers. It views the Earth and its people as a collection of resources to be mined for profit. In this model, hunger is not a problem to be solved; it is a weapon of control. Conflict is not a tragedy; it is a lucrative market. The military-industrial complex is the perfect embodiment of this principle: a self-justifying engine that consumes public treasure to create private wealth, manufacturing the very insecurities it promises to neutralize.

Hunger as a Weapon, Inequality as the System

The gap between the farmer who grows the food and the person who cannot afford to buy it is not an accident. It is engineered. It is maintained by a global architecture of speculative commodities trading, monopolistic control over seeds and distribution, and trade policies designed to funnel wealth upward.

This is structural violence. It kills more silently and surely than any bomb. As the ancient African proverb warns, “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The geopolitical posturing of superpowers—the “elephants” of the US, China, and their allies—is conducted on the terrain of the global poor. The conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen are the direct result of a system where land, resources, and human lives are the currency of power. The poorest women and children are the primary victims, their suffering an externality in the ledgers of the powerful.

Australia: A Case Study in Betrayal

Do not imagine this is a problem only “over there.” The Australian government, under both Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese, provides a pristine example of this betrayal in action.

While speaking of “jobs” and “security,” the political class is executing a massive wealth transfer. They are hijacking the taxes of the Australian people—including those struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, unaffordable housing, and strained public services—to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. and U.K. defence industries.

The public is told the AUKUS submarines are to defend “our way of life,” while the real attack on that way of life is the deliberate underfunding of social services to free up capital for these weapons. The poor in Australia suffer from this theft of their future, just as the poor in Gaza suffer from direct bombardment. The scale of violence differs, but the underlying principle is identical: the grass is meant to suffer for the elephants’ games.

The Path Forward: Enforcing the Family Principle

The solution is not another polite policy proposal. It is a revolution in consciousness. It is the deliberate and relentless application of the Family Principle on a global scale.

1. Name the Theft Relentlessly.

We must become amplifiers for this obscene arithmetic. Every headline about a new weapons contract must be met with the public calculation: “This $X billion purchase could have fed Y million people for a year.” Make the opportunity cost of every missile, every submarine, unbearably visible.

2. Re-localize Power and Build Resilience.

We must build networks of mutual aid that operate on the Family Principle now. Support local food systems that are immune to global speculation. Create community networks for childcare, elder care, and resource sharing. Withdraw our energy and dependence from the brittle, extractive system.

3. Withdraw Consent and Demand Consequences.

Organize mass, non-violent non-cooperation. This includes:

· Tax Resistance: Campaigns to redirect taxes away from military spending.

· Divestment: Pressuring universities, pension funds, and banks to pull investments from the arms industry.

· Political Accountability: Making support for these corrupt wealth transfers a career-ending stance for any politician, of any party.

Conclusion: The Mandate for a Human Future

The dangerous simpletons in their gold castles believe their wealth insulates them from the consequences of their actions. They are wrong. A world awakening to the fact that we are one family—that your starving child is my starving child—is a tide that will wash away every wall.

This is not a plea. It is a mandate. The choice before us is no longer between left and right, but between family and funeral pyre. We can continue to fund our own destruction, or we can choose to nourish our collective future.

The games of the elite are over. It is time we, the people, started acting like the global family we are destined to be.

Theatrics Over Substance: A Critical Examination of the Albanese Government’s Record

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By Andrew Klein   19th November 2025

Upon its election in 2022, the Albanese government promised a new chapter of integrity, social responsibility, and climate action for Australia. However, a closer examination of its record reveals a government whose actions frequently contradict its commitments, prioritising geopolitical theatrics and entrenched interests over the genuine welfare of the Australian people. This article critically assesses the gap between promise and reality, questioning in whose interests the government truly acts.

The Promise-Performance Chasm: A Broken Compact

The government’s own record, assessed by independent trackers, provides a clear starting point. According to RMIT’s Election Promise Tracker, the Albanese government has delivered on a number of its commitments, particularly in establishing a National Anti-Corruption Commission and delivering a royal commission into the Robodebt scandal. However, this must be weighed against its significant failures and reversals.

The promise of increasing real wages above pre-election levels has been broken. In a significant reversal, the government also broke its pledge to implement the former government’s Stage Three tax cuts in full, instead restructuring them—a move defended as being for the “outcome” over the original pledge. Perhaps one of the most stark failures is in environmental stewardship, where the promise to deliver 450 gigalitres of environmental water under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan resulted in the delivery of only 27.5GL, a near-total breakdown of a key environmental commitment.

The Geopolitical Stage: Embracing AUKUS and an Anti-China Posture

The government has enthusiastically embraced the AUKUS security pact, initiated under the previous Morrison government. This commitment locks Australia into a long-term, extraordinarily expensive military partnership with the US and UK. Former US President Donald Trump has confirmed the submarine deal is “full steam ahead,” cementing this alignment. Furthermore, the government has signed a critical minerals deal with the US, explicitly designed to “counter China’s dominance”. This demonstrates a foreign policy that closely follows the American lead, potentially at the expense of Australia’s independent economic and diplomatic interests, moving the nation further into a confrontational stance.

The Contradiction in Moral Leadership: The “Antisemitism Envoy” and the Gaza Crisis

In a move that has drawn significant criticism, the government appointed a special envoy to combat antisemitism in July 2024. While combating religious hatred is a worthy goal, the timing and context of this appointment, during an ongoing conflict in Gaza, have raised serious questions. The action creates a perception of embracing a specific political narrative that equates criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism. This risks stifling legitimate political discourse and moral criticism, while failing to address with equal vigour the rise of Islamophobia or the humanitarian catastrophe itself. It is a theatrical display of moral concern that is selective and politically safe, rather than being a courageous stand for universal human rights.

Climate Policy: A National Security Threat in the Making

The government’s climate policies have been criticised as inadequate by an unlikely source: Australia’s own security community. A report by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, comprising former high-ranking defence officials, framed climate change as “the greatest security threat facing Australia” and accused the government of jeopardising national security through its “haphazard” approach. Another report from the Climate Council went further, stating that the government’s “financial support of the fossil fuel industry is actively undermining Australia’s national security”. This powerful indictment from within the national security establishment reveals a government that is ignoring direct, expert warnings about a fundamental threat to the nation’s future.

Questionable Investments and the Shadow of the Arms Industry

An investigation by The Guardian revealed that Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Future Fund, has invested millions of dollars in foreign weapons manufacturers. This includes companies that have sold combat aircraft and missiles to the Myanmar military, which is accused of crimes against humanity and genocide. This means Australian public money has been funnelled, however indirectly, to a military junta engaged in atrocities. While this spans multiple governments, it highlights a systemic failure to align national investments with professed ethical values. Furthermore, social media claims that the Australian government has funnelled $2.5 billion to Israeli arms manufacturers, while needing further verification from authoritative sources, speak to a widespread public perception that Australian financial and military support is entangled with conflict abroad.

Conclusion: A Government Losing Its Way

The evidence paints a picture of a government that, despite some achievements, is often operating in contradiction to its own promises and the long-term interests of the Australian people. From following a US-led geopolitical script with AUKUS and anti-China positioning, to a climate policy deemed a national security risk by experts, and a moral stance on international conflicts that appears one-sided and theatrical, the Albanese government seems compromised.

When this is combined with its broken promises on wages and the environment, and the troubling questions around its financial links to the global arms trade, a critical question emerges, as you have asked, Andrew: What is the point of such a government? The performance of good governance is not the same as its substance. Until this government realigns its actions with the genuine needs of its people and the principles of peaceful, sustainable development, it risks being remembered for its theatrics rather than its integrity.

The Watchers and the Warped Glass: When Intelligence Serves Power, Not People

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By Andrew Klein 

We are told that vast intelligence alliances exist to keep us safe. That secret treaties and multi-billion dollar surveillance programs are necessary bulwarks against chaos. But a closer examination reveals a more disturbing truth: the intelligence machinery of the Five Eyes alliance and its corporate partners has been repurposed into a system that serves the agendas of political and corporate power, often at the direct expense of the citizens it purports to protect.

A Pact Built in Shadow: The Secret Foundation of Five Eyes

The architecture of modern Western intelligence is not a recent innovation but was built on a secret foundation. The UKUSA Agreement, signed in 1946, created the “Five Eyes” alliance (FVEY) between the intelligence agencies of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This was not a public treaty debated in parliament; it was a clandestine pact. Its existence was so closely guarded that it was not revealed to the public until 2005, and the Australian Prime Minister was not informed of its terms until 1973. This tradition of secrecy created a system that is, by design, insulated from public accountability and democratic oversight, setting a precedent for the opacity that enables today’s abuses.

The Corrupted Compass: When Intelligence is Forced to Kneel

A healthy intelligence service is meant to speak truth to power. This principle is now under direct assault. In the United States, intelligence chiefs who deliver assessments contradicting a political narrative are effectively sidelined. The Director of National Intelligence has publicly accused former officials of criminal acts and relocated analytical bodies to her direct control, a move critics see as the very act of politicization it claims to combat. This creates a vicious cycle where policymakers brush off unwelcome intelligence, dramatically increasing the risk of strategic surprise. When facts become subordinate to political ideology, the first casualty is genuine national security.

The Corporate Marriage: Palantir and the Privatized Panopticon

The most significant and worrying evolution is the deep, lucrative marriage between the state and private surveillance corporations. Companies like Palantir, founded with CIA seed funding, now provide the technological backbone for everything from immigration enforcement to domestic policing.

· The All-Seeing Eye of Immigration: Under a $30 million contract with ICE, Palantir’s software creates a dashboard that gives agents near real-time visibility into the lives of migrants. This platform aggregates border entries, visa records, and personal data to enable what critics call “deportation by algorithm.” This same technology is central to the State Department’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative, which uses AI-powered tools to scan social media and conduct sentiment analysis on visa holders, leading to summary visa revocations for those speaking out on issues like Gaza.

· Policing and Pre-Crime: Palantir’s foray into predictive policing saw cities like New Orleans and Los Angeles use its algorithms to generate lists of “likely offenders.” These programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcry over their inherent bias, as they automated and amplified the injustices of past policing data, disproportionately targeting minority neighbourhoods.

This corporate-state fusion is cemented by a revolving door of funding and contracts. Palantir was founded with CIA funding and is awarded multi-million dollar government contracts, while wealthy donors to political campaigns are placed in key government roles. This undermines democratic accountability and turns public policy into a source of private profit.

The Inevitable Outcome: A System That Threatens Its Own People

This convergence of secretive alliances, politicized analysis, and corporate surveillance has created a system that fundamentally threatens the rights and safety of citizens. The agencies bound by the UKUSA Agreement have been accused of intentionally spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the information to circumvent domestic laws. The power to surveil, once justified by existential foreign threats, has been turned inward.

The “chilling effect” is now a reality for international students afraid to protest, for migrants afraid to seek medical care for fear their data will be handed to deportation officials, and for any citizen who dares to express dissent in a digitally monitored public square.

The lesson is clear: a system built in shadow, corrupted by politics, and supercharged by unaccountable corporate technology will not, and cannot, serve the people. It serves only the ever-expanding interests of power. The watchers are no longer at the gate; they are in our data and our lives, and the glass through which they see is warped by profit and ideology. The greatest threat to our security may no longer be from outside our gates, but from the very systems we built to protect us.

The Endless War: The Unseen System That Feeds on Human Conflict

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By Andrew Klein 

We are not living in an era of isolated wars. We are living inside a single, perpetual war, a self-sustaining system whose primary battlefield is the human mind and whose fuel is human energy. The international conflict, the political polarization in our streets, and the tension in our homes are not separate crises. They are different fronts in the same war, a sophisticated engine of control designed for one purpose: extraction.

This is not a malfunction. It is the system’s core programming. To see it is to take the first step toward reclaiming our minds, our communities, and our future.

The Multi-Front War for Extraction

This system operates simultaneously across all levels of human society, and we can observe its mechanics with chilling clarity.

On the International Stage, the war manifests as geopolitical conflict, arms races, and proxy wars. The value extracted is financial and territorial: billions in weapons contracts, control over oil, minerals, and strategic geography. To justify this, the system requires a formidable “Manufactured Enemy”—a nation, religion, or ideology perpetually deemed a threat to “our way of life.”

On the Domestic Front, the war becomes a culture war, defined by political polarization and class conflict. Here, the value extracted is political and social. By keeping the populace divided and fighting amongst itself—over the “Immigrant,” the “Woke,” or the “Elite”—the system prevents a unified opposition from challenging the true elite. Power is consolidated by turning citizens against each other.

Most insidiously, the war reaches into our Communities and Homes, through domestic violence, social alienation, and a pervasive “war on decency.” This front extracts human and psychological value. The destruction of stable family and community units creates isolated, traumatized individuals who are easier to manipulate and control. The mental energy spent on mere survival is energy that cannot be spent on collective action or critical thought. The enemy here is the intimate “Other”—a partner, a family member, or a neighbour who has been made to seem different and threatening.

The Historical Playbook: A Legacy of Psychological Warfare

This is not a new strategy. The masters of this system have refined their techniques over centuries, learning how to weaponize human perception itself.

· Alexander the Great was a master of myth-making, portraying himself as the embodiment of local gods to appear an unstoppable, divine force. He exploited superstition to intimidate enemies, with ancient accounts saying some foes threw themselves from cliffs rather than face him .

· Genghis Khan wielded terror as a calculated weapon. By sparing a few survivors from sacked cities, he ensured they would spread tales of Mongol brutality, often convincing the next city to surrender without a fight .

· Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, applied the lessons of wartime propaganda to peacetime society. Drawing on the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, he developed techniques to “manipulate public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values” . His work demonstrated that the same psychological tactics used to influence a nation at war could be used to manage a populace at peace.

Modern militaries have institutionalized this knowledge. Psychological operations (PSYOP) are defined as “operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers” . From the “Ghost Army” of World War II that used inflatable tanks to deceive the enemy, to Operation Wandering Soul in Vietnam, which used eerie ghostly wails to exploit spiritual beliefs, the goal has always been the same: to win by dominating the cognitive landscape .

The Vicious Cycle: How the System Perpetuates Itself

This is the most diabolical element of the design: the system is a self-licking ice cream cone that creates the very soldiers it needs to continue.

1. The Grinder: A young person is born into an environment of these wars—a home of tension, a community gutted by poverty, a media landscape saturated with international conflict.

2. The Conditioning: They are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to see the world in terms of “us vs. them.” Their natural pain, confusion, and search for identity are channeled into pre-made molds of tribal hatred.

3. The Recruitment: The system then offers them a purpose: become a soldier in one of its wars. Fight the foreign enemy. Destroy the political opponent. Dominate the person you perceive as weaker. The trauma the system inflicted becomes the fuel for its own perpetuation.

4. The Reward: The player is extracted from their environment and pointed at a “manufactured enemy.” For their service, they may receive a pittance—a salary, a sense of belonging, a hit of dopamine from a social media “win”—while the elite who orchestrated the game reap the vast financial and power rewards.

This cycle is powered by a fuel more potent than money alone: the pathological ego of the 1%. This mindset operates with a “God Complex,” moving populations like chess pieces and viewing human lives as statistics on a spreadsheet. It holds a deep-seated “Contempt for the ‘Herd’,” viewing the 99% not as fellow humans, but as a resource to be managed or a nuisance to be controlled. This pattern has historical precedent in every extractive empire, from Rome to the British East India Company, where the master class maintained power by pitting different groups against each other to prevent a unified rebellion.

The Path Forward: Withdrawing Consent

By identifying this pattern, we have done what the system fears most: we have revealed the wiring behind the scenery. We have shown that the genocide in a distant land, the culture war screaming match on television, and the man abusing his wife are not disconnected tragedies. They are all symptoms of the same disease—a system that runs on conflict and consumes human dignity as its primary fuel.

Our role as conscious beings is to become the immune response to this disease.

The war is endless only for as long as we consent to fight it on their terms. Our mission is to change the very nature of the game. It begins when we turn off the news and talk to our neighbour. It begins when we refuse the pre-packaged hatred and seek our own understanding. It begins when we see the political circus for what it is and withdraw our emotional investment from its actors.

The system stages its play as long as we are willing to sit in the audience. The moment we stand up, turn our backs, and walk out of the theatre, the performance is over.

The war for our minds ends when we, collectively and resolutely, withdraw our consent.

The Theatre of the Absurd: How We Are Made to Consent to Our Own Enslavement

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By Andrew Klein 18th November 2025

We have identified the pattern: a state of never-ending war, from the global stage to the living room. But a war cannot continue without soldiers, without taxpayers, without a populace that accepts it as inevitable. The most profound revelation is this: these wars can only continue as long as we, the people, consent.

Our consent, however, is not given freely. It is manufactured, engineered through a sophisticated system of deprivation, distraction, and fear. To see this system is to take the first step toward reclaiming your own mind, and your own power.

The Pillars of Manufactured Consent

The political linguist Noam Chomsky identified the concept of “manufacturing consent”—the means by which a population is manipulated into agreeing to agendas that serve a powerful minority. In our modern age, this manufacturing process has been refined into a brutal science, resting on several key pillars:

1. The Assault on Thought: Clear thinking is the enemy of the control system. It is actively discouraged through a dual strategy of fear and ridicule. To question the official narrative is to be labelled a “conspiracy theorist,” to express empathy for a designated enemy is to be branded “unpatriotic,” and to propose alternatives is to be mocked as “naive.” This social pressure enforces intellectual conformity more effectively than any law.

2. The Tribal Factory: A united populace is a powerful populace. Therefore, the system works tirelessly to divide us into small, easily managed, and perpetually squabbling groups. The media does not inform; it curates outrage. It amplifies the most extreme voices on every issue, creating a world of binary choices: you are either for us or against us, you belong to this tribe or that one. This fragmentation ensures we see each other as the enemy, rather than the system that pits us against one another.

3. The Complicit Political Class: Our leaders are no longer statesmen; they are careerists. Their primary goal is not to lead with vision, but to secure their position, their funding, and their post-political lobbying career. They are not solving crises; they are managing perceptions. They are enablers, actors in a theatre of the absurd, reading scripts written by their corporate and ideological donors, while the real needs of the people go unaddressed.

The Strategy of Calculated Deprivation

Beyond the psychological warfare lies a more tangible, more brutal strategy: keeping the population in a state of chronic, debilitating precarity.

· The Denial of Basics: An individual who is fighting every day for healthcare, housing, and food is an individual who has no time, energy, or mental bandwidth to question the geopolitical order or the economic structures that enslave them. The system creates a state of perpetual crisis at the personal level to prevent a crisis for the system itself.

· The Sabotage of Education: A true education teaches children to think critically, to question authority, and to understand history. The system requires a populace trained for compliance, not curiosity. Hence, education is defunded, turned into vocational training, and drowned in standardized testing that rewards memorization over understanding.

· The Entrenching Economic System: All of this is locked in place by an economic model that funnels wealth relentlessly upward. It is a system designed to create and maintain a permanent underclass, ensuring a ready supply of cheap labour and desperate soldiers, all while telling them their poverty is a personal failure.

The Grand Distraction: Global Terrors and the Absurd Stage

To complete the illusion, the system offers us grand, terrifying spectacles to consume our remaining attention.

The reality of climate change is twisted from a unifying existential threat into another political football, ensuring no collective action is taken. The fear of an impending world war is constantly stoked, with new enemies always waiting in the wings. We are kept in a state of low-grade panic, our eyes fixed on the horizon for the next big disaster, blind to the silent, slow-motion collapse happening in our own communities.

This is the Theatre of the Absurd, orchestrated by political leaders and their enablers. The stage is set, the lights are dazzling, and the plot is designed to be just coherent enough to hold our attention, but too chaotic to ever actually understand.

Withdrawing Your Consent: The First Revolutionary Act

The solution begins not with a ballot, but with a decision.

It begins the moment you turn off the news and talk to your neighbour.

It begins when you refuse to be ridiculed into silence and speak your truth with courage.

It begins when you see the political circus for what it is and withdraw your emotional investment from its actors.

It begins when you recognize that the person from the “other” tribe is not your enemy, but a fellow victim of the same machinery.

They can only stage the play as long as we are willing to sit in the audience and watch. The moment we stand up, turn our backs, and walk out of the theatre, the performance is over. The war—on every level—ends when we simply, collectively, and resolutely withdraw our consent.

Our power was never truly gone. It was only ever on loan, and we have the right to demand it back. The curtain is falling. It is time to leave the theatre and rebuild the world outside.

The Concession Stand at the Cliff’s Edge: The End of Governance

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By Andrew Klein 

They are not building a civilization. They are running a concession stand at the edge of a cliff, arguing over the price of peanuts while the ground crumbles beneath them.

This is not a metaphor. It is the operating principle of our time.

Look around. The evidence is in the flicker of your lights and the drop of your wifi—the cascading failure of basic infrastructure, met with a theatrical shrug. It is in the quiet, accepted tragedy that people died during a telecommunications outage, their lives reduced to a temporary public relations problem.

This failure of foresight and fundamental duty is not confined to the power grid. It is the very air we breathe, the society we inhabit. Observe the pattern, right across the spectrum:

· On Climate Change: We are offered magical thinking and faith in future technology while the planet burns. The ultimate long-term threat is met with the shortest of short-term political calculations.

· On Social Fabric: We see a deliberate erosion of the safety net—housing insecurity, food insecurity, children in poverty—all while the machinery of revenue collection, fines, and punitive measures grinds on with ruthless efficiency. The state is increasingly adept at taking, and abdicating its role in providing.

· On “Security”: We embark on grandiose, multi-generational military spending programs like AUKUS, a fortress mentality projected outward, while the domestic foundations of national strength—healthy, educated, and secure citizens—are left to rot. We are building a battleship while the crew is starving.

· On Morality: We witness a genocide in Gaza and a government that, through word and deed—from allowing the export of weapons components to offering diplomatic cover—becomes complicit. The same leaders who provide photo-ops at food banks, celebrating the “kindness” of multinational corporations that profit from the very inequality that creates the need for charity, have normalized a profound moral bankruptcy.

This is the “new normal”: a world where we are expected to accept the unacceptable. Where locking up children for so-called ‘adult’ offences is just another line in a budget, while the real, adult failures of leadership go unpunished.

The system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed—to preserve itself and the flows of power and profit, even at the cost of its own people and its own future. The billing continues. The performances of governance continue. But the project of building a just, resilient, and moral society has been abandoned.

The most damning part is that we are no longer surprised. We have been conditioned to expect the concession stand to run out of peanuts, for the cliff to erode further, and for the bill for this monumental inaction to be paid in lives, stability, and a habitable planet.

To be unsurprised is to be complicit. It is time to be outraged again. It is time to demand more than peanuts from the edge of the abyss.

The Great Pill Heist: How Big Pharma Targets Your Health and Your Wallet

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By Andrew Klein   18th November 2025

They are not just selling medicine. They are selling a doctrine: that your health is a product, and its price is whatever they can take. In the shadow of this global enterprise, a quiet war is being waged for the soul of healthcare itself. On one side stands a for-profit model designed for extraction. On the other stands Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), a bastion of public health now under sustained assault.

This is an investigation into the machinery of that assault.

The Bulwark: Australia’s PBS

Established in 1948, the PBS is a testament to the idea that healthcare is a public good, not a luxury. It operates on a simple, powerful principle: the government acts as a single, powerful negotiator for 25 million people, leveraging this collective power to make essential medicines affordable for all.

The scheme is available to every Australian with a Medicare card. As of 2025, the maximum co-payment is $31.60** for general patients and **$7.70 for concession card holders. A Safety Net caps annual spending, protecting households from financial ruin. The scheme’s integrity is guarded by the independent Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC), which rigorously assesses whether a new drug is clinically effective and cost-effective enough to be listed. This evidence-based approach is what makes the PBS a world-class system—and a primary target for an industry built on maximising profit.

The Assault: American Pressure and the Profit Motive

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry, where prices are on average 370% higher than in Australia, views the PBS as an “egregious and discriminatory” barrier to profits. Their campaign is multi-pronged and relentless.

Their goal is to force a system where “the market” (i.e., their pricing power) dictates cost, not a government’s assessment of value. The stark reality of this difference is seen in the price of common medicines. In Australia, a script for cholesterol drug Lipitor costs the patient around $31.60**. In the U.S., the same drug can cost **around $2,000. For a life-changing autoimmune drug like Humira, the cost to an Australian is $31.60**, while an American faces a bill of approximately **$11,000. This disparity is not due to shipping or manufacturing costs; it is the difference between a system designed for access and one designed for extraction.

A major victory for this campaign was the 2005 Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. A key change was the creation of two drug categories: F1 (patented) and F2 (generic). The agreement effectively outlawed “reference pricing,” a practice where the price of a new, patented drug was benchmarked against cheaper, existing generics. This single change made it significantly harder to contain the prices of the newest, most expensive drugs, slowly inflating the PBS’s cost.

The Illusion: Research & Development vs. Marketing & Profit

The pharmaceutical industry’s primary justification for astronomical prices is the high cost of Research & Development (R&D). The data reveals a different story.

A global analysis of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies during the peak pandemic years (2020-2022) found they spent a combined $377.6 billion on dividends, share buybacks, and executive compensation. This staggering figure amounted to 83% of their total profits and was nearly as much as they spent on R&D. As UNAIDS head Winnie Byanyima stated, this proves the claim that enormous profits are necessary for innovation is a “political myth.”

The financial priorities of the industry are clear. The profit motive prioritises returns to investors over equitable access or even reinvestment in R&D. Globally, marketing budgets often rival or exceed R&D budgets, a business model that depends on creating demand for new drugs, often by pathologising normal human experience. The creation of a “pill for personality” or a “vaccine for violence” would be the ultimate, most lucrative frontier. The slope is not just greased; it is a downhill racetrack.

The Defences: Regulatory Capture and Legal Labyrinths

When systems meant to protect the public are influenced by the very industries they regulate, it creates a form of “regulatory capture.”

Bodies like Medicines Australia create their own codes of conduct and enter into strategic agreements with the government. While providing a framework, this self-regulation often serves to protect the industry’s image and practices from more stringent independent oversight.

When a drug causes harm, an Australian citizen must face a legal system stacked against them. While a company cannot hide behind TGA approval as a full defence, they often rely on the “learned intermediary” principle, arguing they only needed to warn the doctor, not the patient. Pursuing a claim means an individual must litigate against a corporation with near-limitless legal resources. High-profile cases show victory is possible but is always a long, complex, and emotionally devastating process.

The Silent Crisis: The Unreported Harm

A critical failure in the safety net is the systemic under-reporting of adverse drug reactions to the TGA. Reporting by doctors is voluntary and in decline, with estimates that over 95% of adverse reactions go unreported. This means dangerous side effects can remain hidden for years, exposing thousands to unknown risks, while the system relies heavily on mandatory reporting from the pharmaceutical companies themselves—a profound conflict of interest.

Conclusion: A Choice of Futures

The battle for the PBS is a proxy for a larger conflict. It is a choice between two futures: one where medicine is a public good, governed by evidence and a duty of care, and another where it is a purely financial instrument, governed by quarterly reports and shareholder value.

The pressure to abandon our model for their profit will only intensify. The question is whether we value a system that provides for all, or one that prices out the vulnerable. The integrity of our healthcare, and the very principle of a fair go, depends on the answer.

The Silent Passenger: Marburg, Global Travel, and a System Prioritizing Weapons Over Wellnes

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The Silent Passenger: Marburg, Global Travel, and a System Prioritizing Weapons Over Wellness

By Andrew Klein 

A new outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus has been confirmed in Ethiopia, a stark reminder of an ever-present threat. This pathogen represents a perfect storm of viral lethality, with case fatality rates in historical outbreaks ranging from a devastating 24% to a catastrophic 88%. There are no approved vaccines or antivirals for it; care is purely supportive. Yet, the global response to such threats remains hampered by a fundamental misalignment of priorities. This article will analyze how this specific outbreak highlights a broken global system—one that is adept at preparing for war but inept at preserving peace and health, leaving even distant nations like Australia vulnerable through the silent corridor of international air travel.

The Nature of the Threat: A Persistent and Deadly Foe

The Marburg virus is a filovirus, a close and equally deadly cousin of Ebola. Its natural host is the Egyptian fruit bat, from which it spills over to humans, often through prolonged exposure to mines or caves inhabited by these bat colonies. Once in the human population, it spreads relentlessly through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected individuals.

The history of this pathogen is a ledger of tragedy. The first known outbreak occurred in 1967 in Germany and Serbia, linked to lab work with African green monkeys, resulting in 31 cases and 7 deaths—a 23% fatality rate. The largest and deadliest outbreak on record struck Angola from 2004 to 2005, infecting 252 people and killing 227—a horrifying 90% fatality rate. More recently, a 2023 outbreak in Equatorial Guinea saw 16 confirmed and 23 probable cases, with 12 confirmed and all 23 probable deaths, a 75% fatality rate. This virus is not a theoretical risk; it is a recurring, brutal fact of life in parts of Africa, with recent outbreaks in Ghana, Tanzania, and Rwanda demonstrating its persistent and wide-ranging threat.

The Australian Gateway: A Calculated Risk via Modern Travel

The risk to a country like Australia is not remote; it is a calculated probability based on the virus’s characteristics and the reality of global connectivity. The core of this vulnerability lies in the virus’s incubation period, which ranges from 2 to 21 days. This means an infected individual can feel perfectly healthy, board a flight from Africa, and arrive in Australia without showing a single symptom.

While flights from Africa are not “short,” they are well within this 21-day window. A passenger could be infected, travel to Australia, and only begin to show symptoms days or even weeks after clearing border security and integrating into the community. Our current border screening, which relies on thermal scanners and health declarations to identify symptomatic individuals, is useless against a virus during its incubation period. This creates a silent corridor for the virus to enter the country. The threat is not hypothetical; a 2008 case involved a tourist who developed Marburg symptoms after visiting a cave in Uganda and was later hospitalized in the Netherlands. The pathway to Australia is just as feasible.

The Systemic Failure: A World Armed for War, Unprepared for Care

This glaring vulnerability is exacerbated by a global system that has consistently prioritized the weaponization of pathogens over the strengthening of public health—a profound and dangerous misallocation of resources.

Following the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, funding for biodefense surged dramatically. What was an estimated $700 million annually before 2001 ballooned to a peak of nearly $8 billion by 2005, with steady spending averaging around $5 billion in the years since. This massive investment was driven by the classification of pathogens like Marburg as “Category A bioterrorism threats,” a label that unlocks vast national security funding.

This Biodefense and Weaponization Focus stands in stark contrast to the chronic neglect of public health. The primary driver here is national security and perceived threats from state or non-state actors, funded by massive military and security budgets. The response is often targeted and secretive, focused on specific “select agents,” resulting in stockpiles of medical countermeasures for specific scenarios.

Meanwhile, the Public Health Focus, which is concerned with human security and the inherent threat of natural diseases, is left starved. Organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) are crippled by a financial structure where over 80% of their budget comes from voluntary contributions that donors control. This creates a “structural dysfunction” where the WHO must often “prioritise donor interests over global health needs,” leaving the global health architecture fragile and reactive.

The disparity is starkly visible in vaccine development. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defence awarded $35.7 million to advance a single Marburg virus vaccine candidate, explicitly citing the virus as “a national security threat.” While this research has value, it highlights a paradigm where a pathogen’s danger is measured by its potential to be weaponized, not by the lives it claims in natural outbreaks. This is the ultimate misallocation: preparing for a deliberate attack while leaving the world exposed to a far more likely natural one, all while billions are spent on the technology for never-ending wars.

The Path Forward: From Reactive Panic to Proactive Resilience

To secure our future against pandemics, whether from Marburg or an unknown “Disease X,” we must fundamentally reorient our priorities.

1. Invest in Independent Global Health: The WHO must be reformed and provided with a core budget of guaranteed, flexible funding, freeing it from the political and financial dictates of its largest donors.

2. Build Regional Resilience: The success of organizations like Africa CDC demonstrates the power of decentralized, regional responses. The future of health security lies in a networked system of such bodies that can act quickly and coordinate internationally.

3. Re-Balance the Scales: Funding for public health preparedness must be seen as a non-negotiable investment in global stability, on par with funding for national defence. The “never-ending wars” will not be fought only on battlefields, but in the hospitals and communities left vulnerable by a neglected public health infrastructure.

The Marburg outbreak in Ethiopia is a warning. The virus is a passenger on every international flight, and our current system—which prioritizes weapons over wellness—is its unwitting accomplice. We have the resources to build a world more resilient to these threats, but it requires the courage to shift our focus from preparing for war to the sacred duty of preserving life.