Category: Informed Comment
Will the conservatives when they have done with the philosophical ideals of the left once again take on the mantle of the capitalistic rights of the individual over the collective?
The way I see it at the moment is that all they are doing is governing for the common good and I have to salute that.
The philosophical arguments will come later.
My thought for the day
It’s difficult to caste yourself in a new light when you’re coming out of the darkness.
Not laughing now (ODT)
Under the Coalition’s “responsible budget management”, net debt has increased from $161,253 million at 31 August 2013, a week before the election, to $424,164 million at the end of February this year.
Still stuck in slogan land, Coalition language is changing.
We have gone from a “targeted, modest and scalable” response to “targeted, measured and scalable” and now Frydenberg is calling for “quick, strong and co-ordinated action” from the G20 countries.
The self-satisfied smirks, the ridiculing of the idea of well-being, and the draconian persecution of the unemployed have disappeared.
After more than a decade of their bullshit, all of a sudden, “we are all in this together”.
Hope in the time of corona lies in rebuilding the role of government, supporting the institutions that support people and dispensing with the proven lunacy that insists fattening corporations and “the market” delivers “healthier, wealthier, more motivated and productive workers”.
Because it doesn’t. As the times reveal; it never did.
via Hope in the time of coronavirus lies in rebuilding the state | Van Badham | Opinion | The Guardian
Check Centrelink, with its uncontrolled queues of impoverished supplicants lining up cheek-by-jowl, incubating and spreading as they beg for a handout.
Wanted: A prime minister able to deal with a crisis
and
JobKeeper Payment a gun to the heads of over one million temporary entrants
Personally, I’m not too worried about Chinese soft power. If Westerners look bad in comparison, that is only because of their own incompetence rather than the nefariousness of the Chinese. The Chinese State wants to make deals. The globalists want something much dearer: they want to bribe you into losing your national soul, your traditional values, your fighting spirit.
This crisis may come to be seen as the moment in which a declining and incoherent liberal-globalist West was geopolitically overtaken by an confident and organized national-authoritarian China. If so, we can also expect other countries may be tempted to change their political models.
via We Are All Totalitarians Now, by Guillaume Durocher – The Unz Review
This is what the 1% don’t want to happen (ODT)
Dr Steven Hail believes that government spending can save the economy from serious recession in the wake of Covid-19.
Its a rigged system go to Robert Reich’s explanation on Youtube (ODT
China is helping 89 other countries Trump meanwhile is helping himself (ODT)
As never before, coronavirus will bring into focus the depraved inefficiency of this system – the model of profit-driven health care, of market forces that look out for the short-term interests of business, not the long-term interests of us all.
There are alternatives. Right now, Americans are being offered a choice between a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, who champions health care as a right because it is a common good, and a Democratic party boss, Joe Biden, who champions the business lobbies he depends on for funding and his political success. One is being marginalised and vilified as a threat to the American way of life by a handful of corporations that own the US media, while the other is being propelled towards the Democratic nomination by those same corporations.
Coronavirus has an important, urgent lesson to teach us. The question is: are we ready yet to listen?
via A lesson coronavirus is about to teach the world, by Jonathan Cook – The Unz Review
Now think back to late 2007 and 2008, when eight years of Republican recklessness in war and finance came perilously close to destroying the global banking system and did succeed in crashing the markets and plunging the nation, and the global economy, into what’s now called the Great Recession, the worst recession since the Depression of 1929 and the 1930s. The only one major nation that steered clear of recession was China. While demand was collapsing around the world, it was China, acting like some super engine, that pulled the global economy out of the quagmire. Continuing to wage economic war against China today is thus suicidally insane.
Neither Covid-19 nor a major recession poses a threat to our survival as a species. We do, however, face two existential threats, both created by our species, and each featuring our nation in the lead role. At the very moment when only global unity and cooperation can save us from threats of nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, deadly nationalism is tearing our species apart. Can Covid-19 teach us that those two great menaces to our existence are also not zero-sum games? That our species either wins or we, as well as many other species, all lose?
Australia’s attorney general Christian Porter has pooh-poohed concerns about the fate of casual workers caught up in the coronavirus crisis, saying they would have “already made provisions” if they have to take time off work.
I am writing to you from Bergamo, Italy, at the heart of the coronavirus crisis. The news media in the US has not captured the severity of what is happening here. I am writing this post because of each of you, today, not the government, not the school district, not the mayor, each individual citizen has the chance, today to take actions that will deter the Italian situation from becoming your own country’s reality. The only way to stop this virus is to limit contagion. And the …
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Australia’s economic growth improves, but hold the champagne. Economic headwinds? Not really. Economy stronger than the OECD, Europe, Canada and the UK? Errr … no. Strong jobs growth? Sorry, no. Alan Austin runs his ruler over the latest quarterly accounts.
via Australia’s economic growth improves, but hold the champagne – Michael West
The Liar from the Shire has sunk to new depths – ok, maybe not new – with his ridiculous claim that “Emissions today are 50 million tonnes less on average each year under our government than under the previous government.”
This crap should be used in school maths classes as an example of how data can be manipulated to mislead.
The latest release tracking Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions includes a table of emissions for each financial year.
Emissions to the end of June 2007 were 627.0 Mt CO2-e. Six years later, they were 537.6, and 533.9 a year after that when the carbon price was repealed in 2014.
In the year ending September 30, 2019, they were 530.8.
To save you doing the sums, under Labor policies, emissions reduced by over 93 Mt CO2-e. Since the Coalition “axed the tax” almost six years ago, emissions have reduced by about 3 Mt CO2-e.
But hey ScottyFromMarketing, run with that line if you want. Get Angus to say it too.
Because we ALL know how trustworthy you two are.
Remarkable, is it not? Trump is openly dismissive of the experts and the number they have announced because what he says is true because he is Donald Trump. He identifies it as ‘coronaflu’ and not a virus. My favourite part of the summary is his suggestion that people with the disease return to work. Not only is this fundamentally irresponsible from a medical perspective, it also shows a quite callous disregard for the sick. The President is effectively saying ‘GET BACK TO WORK!’. He simply lacks the empathy (like a certain Prime Minister I could name) to offer human responses. All he can see is the consequences for him and his fellow rich people. Ordinary people do not enter into the equation.
via Ideology Über Alles: The White House and COVID-19 – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Since 2002, Quinn showed, the most productive Australian firms (the top 5 per cent) had not kept pace with the most productive firms globally. In fact, Australia’s ‘productivity frontier’ has slipped back by about one-third. The best of ‘Made in Australia’ hasn’t kept pace with the best of ‘Made in Germany’, ‘Made in the Netherlands’ or even ‘Made in America’.”
And then there’s the other 95 per cent. In the past two decades, their output per hour worked has barely risen. So 19 out of 20 Australian firms don’t produce much more per hour than they did when Sydney hosted the Olympics.
A Productivity Commission study has found that half the slowdown in productivity improvement in the market economy in recent years is accounted for by manufacturing. A separate survey of management practices in manufacturing firms found that Australia’s managers rank below those in Canada, Sweden, Japan, Germany and the US.
The drop we’ve experienced is “not the fault of employees: there are simply fewer good opportunities available. According to Treasury’s analysis, much of the drop in job-switching is because workers are less likely to transition from mature firms to young firms. With fewer start-up firms, it stands to reason that there are fewer start-up jobs.”
Other parties are not like this.
Whenever you hear someone say “they’re all the same”, point out they are repeating deliberate Liberal Party propaganda.
The myth of sameness is precisely what enables the Liberals to get away with this corruption.
They are counting on people to believe this crap is business as usual – so One Nation, Palmer and now the Greens – can funnel preferences to them with no one even thinking about how important it is to put the Liberals last on their ballot paper.
Don’t let this country develop a culture of corruption. Kick them out.
