Jenny Craig
Kath Tucker's grizzle about Jenny Craig and similar diet institutions (GL #128) fails to take into account the fact that many women wish to lose weight in order to feel better — the fact that they may look better is secondary.
I can only write from my own experience (and who would presume to write from any other viewpoint) and say that I found Jenny Craig superb in that I lost 10kg of 20-year-old fat which I considered unmovable, and what is more I felt great the whole time as the fat and sludge were removed and not replaced since the food supplied was highly nutritive.
Yes, I too experienced the self indulgence of an occasional "binge", but we are advised not to "punish ourselves by not eating" but to resume the diet as soon as possible and be stronger in the future.
This is not an advert for Jenny Craig or any other member of the "diet industry" just a point of view from a cynic who was converted and who takes objection to Ms Tucker's absurdly sweeping generalisation "For women, the diet industry is either a vicious circle or a dead end ..." Ain't I a woman?
Elaine Simes
Numulgi NSW
Support
I am an ex-member of Resistance and was in the past an avid reader of Direct Action.
I have watched the development of Green Left Weekly over the last two or three years and am full of admiration for your efforts.
I look forward to my subscription arriving every week, and read your journal through from cover to cover and find in it information that is unattainable in the Murdoch (scum) press.
It is a breath of fresh air.
I wish to congratulate you and your staff on your commendable efforts. GLW is one of the few bright spots to emerge on the Australian left for many years. I was extremely disappointed to see Broadside fold.
Please find enclosed a small donation of $5. It is the most an unsuccessful writer like myself can afford.
I hope readers who contribute letters to your forum can keep the petty complaints and whingeing to a minimum and simply appreciate the valuable resource GLW has become.
Finally I hope other avid GLW readers can show similar support.
Robert Cook
Ivanhoe Vic
Praise
A certain number of GATT members (our Allies) have heaped praise on Australia, (the Australian Cabinet, that is) for maintaining their expectations in our continued reduction or removal of protective tariffs. Most nations lag behind us on a long timetable, but "Australia" is always anxious to show due allegiance to someone/anyone, before anything of consequence is "addressed" for the Australian Nation.
Consider pollies' predilection for US inspired economic-rationalism policies, annual large pay rises, travel and superannuation allowances, gold passes, media coverage, political donations and/or support from woodchippers, media magnates and others who do not need to care for the words "social justice", the thousands of hours during the "sittings" wasted on exchanging insults, the lies, the grandstanders, the purchase of rusting, out of date "defence" items — at a cost since 1982 of $40 billion — the cheap, nasty commercial TV programmes and the monetary assistance to US multinationals.
In signing the GATT round, they have supported the Allies' need to consign the third world peoples into the new world order of World Bank, IMF slavery.
Our Nation includes almost 20% actual unemployed (i.e. two million not one) and two million living below the poverty line (remember the Hawke promises and tears?). Any trust in or respect for the various cabinets and their international mentors has long since evaporated away.
All the normal government responsibilities in the matters of water resources, education, hospitals, banks, energy, transport and Telecom have been handed over to the "clever" ones, including their mates, or to foreigners and their stooges.
And every 3 or 4 years their leader insists on having his painting hung in Parliament House.
Why stop at just the painting?
John R. Clancy
Sutherland NSW
[Edited for length.]
Pigs
In the ongoing saga of Parkville Piggeries versus Scone-Puckville Environment Watch — SPEW for short — full support must go to SPEW for their "David" stance against the pork "Goliath" in the face of huge corporate odds. The ramifications of effluent discharging from 70,000 intensively housed pigs and a 300,000 per annum processing plant-abattoir is mind boggling, to say the least.
Our entrepreneurial prime minister and fellow business partner, Al Constantinidus are borrowing $30 million in a joint venture with Danish pig consortium, Danpork.
Prime Minister Keating's government has allowed Danpork a wide slice of the Australian market in the form of cheap pork imports. These imports have been allowed into Australia at the expense pig meat producers since the Hawke government sanctioned it during the 1980s.
Significant Australian pigmeat producers have gone to the wall, as a result, therefore removing valuable contributors to the national economy. Once again, these pig producers are victims of Mr Keating's level playing field principle. The pig industry victims are in good company, along with fruit producers, fishing industry members, grain and sugar producers, etc.
An Australian prime minister supposedly elected to represent and support all Australians is actually, by business involvement furthering the potential monopoly of the Australian pig industry by a foreign company. What price loyalty?
This self-seeking action represents blatant conflict of interest and deception of the Australian people. The prime minister promotes a strong, export orientated Australian economy, yet becomes involved in the ongoing weakening of the Australian pig industry by an act of collusion.
If Mr Keating is not prepared to represent the Australian people as he is sworn to by oath, the Australian people should take action for his removal from office. It is not morally or politically correct that our elected representatives represent the interests of their party or themselves at the expense of the people.
James Guider
Quirindi NSW
[Edited for length.]