IMF PATS OZ ON THE BACK

by Jeremy Lee
As October opened the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held their annual meetings in Washington. As usual, it was like a military operation, with 20,000 demonstrators pitted against armoured police, razor wire, chemical sprays, etc. As a token gesture towards protesters the IMF's managing director, Horst Kohler, called for efforts to make globalisation work for the world's poorest citizens.
"My message to our critics and the protesters this weekend is straightforward," he said. "We share many of your concerns about globalisation, the benefits of which have not been equally shared round the world. But the objective should not be less globalisation, but better globalisation." (Sydney Morning Herald, 28/9/02)

Well, that should be balm to the souls of the destitute! We can't imagine why the demonstrators, soothed by such obvious sincerity, did not immediately go home! Perhaps a clue can be gleaned from the IMF's latest report on Australia. Veteran economist Ross Gittins, writing in the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald (28-29/9/02), under the headlines
"CARROT FOR THE RICH AND STICK FOR THE POOR IS NOT REFORM",
said that the IMF was highly satisfied with Australia's initiatives over the past few years, including: "... broad fiscal consolidation (getting rid of the Budget Deficit), implementation of a transparent framework for fiscal policy (the Charter of Budget Honesty), adoption of inflation targeting, broad structural reforms in product and labour markets, and external trade liberalization (cutting protection), have established a sound foundation for the Australian economy.
"This solid base, combined with appropriate discretionary monetary and fiscal policy actions, helped Australia to sustain strong economic growth despite the substantial external shocks stemming from the Asian financial crisis and the synchronized slowdown in the world economy in 2001...."

Now we can see where Peter Costello gets his rich stock of clichés! However, the IMF is still not satisfied that Australia has done enough. The major priority is to: "....'enhance incentives to work, save and invest' by reforming the personal income tax system so all the changes we made as part of the GST package just two years ago don't rate apparently. "No (Ross Gittins added), the further change we need 'in particular' is to cut the top tax rate, which applies to incomes in excess of $60,000 a year. "The top marginal tax rate at 47 percent kicks in at a relatively low income level (one that is about two times median income) and is high relative to the corporate income tax rate, which has been reduced to 30 percent,' the IMF explains. "'This disparity has distorted economic behaviour by creating substantial incentives for tax avoidance. The (IMF) staff recommends that efforts be made to bring the top marginal tax rate down over time to a level in line with the corporate income tax rate and that the income threshold at which it applies be raised substantially.'

So this is the IMF's 'magic bullet' – the single change that would really transform our economy. Let's look at it. "What's being adopted is a hugely expensive tax cut, but one limited to just the roughly 10 percent of taxpayers that earn over $60,000. So someone on $100,000 a year would get a saving of $6,800 a year ...." At the other end of the scale, however, low-income Australians are getting too much: "... As for industrial relations, the main problem is that our minimum wages 'remain very high in Australia relative to other advanced economies'. If they were lower this would 'enhance employment prospects for low-skilled workers'. "So there you have the IMF's expert analysis of our economy's remaining woes. The first part of our problem is that our rich are motivated solely by money, so they must be given the carrot of huge tax cuts. "Our poor, on the other hand, are lazy and utterly unmotivated by money, so they should be given more stick to get them off their backsides....." Whew! No wonder the IMF is the darling of the world's poor! The globalist way to close the gap between rich and poor!

THE CAUSES OF TERRORISM

JOB CREATION NOT INCLUDED

One of the last great railway extensions is under way in Australia, the link between Alice Springs and Darwin. The idea is that, when completed, Darwin will become Australia's Asian Gateway. The railway will extend 1420 km (about 850 miles in the old language). The project started in April 2001, and by July this year (15 months) 304 km of track had been completed, 921 km of corridor had been cleared, 747 km of embankment built, 591 km of the capping layer completed and 30 of the 97 bridges built (AFR, 10/10/02) 583,000 of the two million required concrete sleepers, and half the two million tones of ballast have been produced.

And how many does this giant project directly employ? About 1,200 people. Australia's gang of four major banks "downsize" more than that each year. In contrast to the Transcontinental railway built during World War I, which was Australian financed, built and owned, the Alice-Darwin venture is being built by a foreign consortium, the Asia Pacific Transport company, made up of Halliburton KBR, Barclay Mowlem, the John Holland Group, Macmahon, Australian Railway Group and SANT. The consortium will own and operate the railway for 50 years before handing it back to the South Australian and Northern Territory governments.
The name Halliburton rings a bell. Isn't that the company in which Vice President Dick Cheney is a major stock-holder, and which, it has been alleged, he rorted when on the board?

While we're on the question of unemployment rates, John Quiggin (AFR, 12/9/02) commented: ".... Taking both official unemployment and disability support into account, Australia's current performance on unemployment is best described as mediocre to poor. Official rates of 6 percent unemployment, bad as they are, do not tell the whole story. About 400,000 Australian men of working age are receiving disability or sickness benefits. This is about 6 percent of the working age population, compared with less than 2 percent in the late 1960s .... Adding the 300,000 extra disability beneficiaries to the official count of 370,000 unemployed, we get an unemployment rate of about 12 percent for males. And this does not count those who have taken advantage of early access to the age pension, or have no income at all ...."

So we need a minimum of at least another 300 Alice-to-Darwin railways to soak up the unemployment. And even that would only do it for about three or four years! Or perhaps we can put them all to work in the Australian Tax Department, helping the IMF programme for future prosperity!

AN AGE OF SECRECY AND PROPAGANDA

Speakers at the Melbourne Press Club's journalism conference castigated suppression of information and government secrecy, according to Barclay Crawford (AFR, 10/10/02):
".... The editor of The Australian, Michael Stutchbury, said the 'rising culture of secrecy' was the biggest issue facing journalism. He said the media needed to become more pro-active in countering the 'spin masters' in the Government and private sector ....Freedom of Information is becoming a sick joke – one Victorian newspaper sought travel costs of federal MPs but was advised it would have to pay $1 million for the information. The Director of ABC News and Current Affairs, Max Uechtritz, told the conference spin doctors in government and business were 'weapons of mass distraction'. There has never been so many of them who are so well paid and well trained, he said, describing spin as the cocaine of politics.

"Not only were there far more public relations advisers than journalists, but many journalism-trained policy advisers were part of the government. The best example was Bob Carr's Labor Government, whose poaching operation had stripped the press gallery. 'The Education Department is a mini newsroom of former experienced media identities," Uechtritz said.

"A recent survey of public relations workers found that one in four admitted to lying on the job. 'I wonder what percentage of those lied in their response,' he added." Ah, well! It all helps to provide "full employment". But it sounds more like the old Lenin School of Political Warfare that a sincerely-committed government in a free society.

AN INDIVIDUAL'S DEEDS

An Asian university student living in Melbourne, recently killed two of his classmates and wounded others, and has been charged with murder. We do not absolve this individual from his actions by calling it by another name. What about the Individual Decisions taken by the Ruling Elite? Why do we absolve the ruling elite from their actions just because they say they do it in the 'name of Australia' or 'the war on terrorism' or 'good versus evil'?
What of the State terrorism carried out by the Indonesian military, with the full knowledge and collusion of Australian governments? We dignify these foul deeds by other names.

John Pilger is right to say ("Australian Government Lethal Hypocrisy", October 17th, 2002):
• The Australian military, is, in effect, an extension of the Pentagon.
• For 40 years Australian governments colluded with state terrorism in Indonesia.
• In Indonesia, Australians, together with their American counterparts, have secretly resumed training the Indonesian military, which in the world cup of terrorism, is the undisputed champion.
• Australian ships operate with the American fleet in the Gulf, enforcing an embargo against Iraq, which has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqi children.

How can individual politicians be absolved of decisions taken, whilst members of governments, which the end result is wholesale bloodshed and deaths, yet the young Asian student is made responsible for his act? The politicians may not have fired the guns or dropped the bombs, but it was the decisions made by them which set the war machines in motion resulting in the deaths and destruction.

The idea that even kings are responsible, as kings, for their actions was once understood and accepted by the British peoples. It is the concept of personal responsibility and the idea is interwoven into the concept of kingship. C.H. Douglas warned us: There is no such thing as an effective 'national responsibility,' it is pure abstractionism under cover of which oppression and tyranny to individuals, which would not be tolerated if inflicted by a personal ruler, escape effective criticism. ("Social Credit")

BEWARE THE FALSE PATRIOTISM

by Betty Luks
A Liberal politician has suggested the flag-raising and singing of the national anthem ceremony in Australian schools should be reintroduced. Why? According to 'political correctness' wouldn't it cause further 'division' in such a 'multicultural' nation as Australia? Wasn't that one of the reasons put forward for discontinuing it in the first place?
"Australia should stand on her own two feet" and the Paul Keating's of this nation "didn't want us to tug the forelock" anymore. Why the 'change' on the part of the Liberals? I don't remember them putting up a strong defense when the ceremony came under attack.

The present call for its reinstatement has more to do with Australians becoming more and more disenchanted with, and angrily distrustful of politicians and their masters, rather than a burst of genuine patriotism within the hearts and minds of the ruling elite. It was G.K. Chesterton who said words to the effect: "The Patriot loves his Patria but the Cosmopolitan does not the Cosmos."

'THE HEARTS AND MINDS' OF THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE

"Beware the False Patriotism" was written before Paul Kelly's "Hearts and minds" article was published in The Australian, October 26th, 2002, and Kelly's article illustrates the points made. He writes of "the recasting" of John Howard as a "figure of unity" having "divided the nation so bitterly for much of his prime ministership"; the new unifying role which Kelly thinks is "bizarre".

"For the first time his portrait of the common man as Prime Minister has emotional resonance. Howard has grieved with the people and for the people, and grief is a cathartic force. Howard told me this week that Bali 'as tragedies often do, has stripped away inhibitions'. Mr. Kelly continues, "It has stripped away Howard's inhibitions, not just those of the families and friends of the victims. All his 28 years in public life, Howard has been a bottled-up MP and a bottled-up PM. The Bali tragedy has unbuttoned, briefly, his emotional straitjacket. For Howard it has opened a journey of self-discovery."
What hogwash!!! Howard has been in politics for 28 years! He had no inhibitions sending ordinary Australians 'to the wall' financially. I haven't seen or heard of him airing his public grief at the news of so many young Australians suiciding; their young lives wasted because of the despair and hopelessness around them and within them. Has John Howard visited the drought stricken region of northern Victoria recently? I hear there are 19 dairy farmers on 'suicide watch'; they can see no way out of their financial debts and related burdens.

In the recasting of John Howard into a "unifying" figure and a "caring person" the act of which "has emotional resonance," the Australian public is once again being psycho-politically manipulated by the 'spin doctors'. For those who have eyes to see, the policy behind the 'recasting of Howard' can easily be seen. The media is cynically playing on human emotions in the wake of the Bali Tragedy – but there are ulterior motives. There is another agenda.

It must be understood and recognised the 'doctors of spin' are trained in the art of mass mind control. Noam Chomsky has done us a great favour by explaining how this 'spin doctoring' works ("Manufacturing Consent", Pantheon Books, 1988): "Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. Steady and wholly sympathetic attention is given to demonstrators, mourners, weeping people, masses held in honour of the victims, and expressions of outrage... The population 'continues to mourn', and 'public outrage mounted'.

The objective behind this 'day-in-day-out repetition of outrage and indignation' is to call very forcible attention to the need for 'more control'. In Australia's case, it is to put the federal Government 'on the spot' to initiate tighter 'anti-terrorism' laws and in the wake of the Melbourne shootings 'tighter gun control'.

ROBERT FISK – HOW TO SHUT UP YOUR CRITICS

We reproduce below a portion of a Robert Fisk article which appeared in The Independent, UK, October 21st, 2002

Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer – there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy".
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan – a close personal friend of Mr Sharon – believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".

You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up.

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite list – it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch" – committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism". The University of North Carolina is being targeted – apparently because freshmen were required to read passages from the Koran – along with Harvard where, like students in many other US universities, undergraduates are demanding that their colleges disinvest in companies that sell weapons to Israel.

In some cases, American universities – which happily disinvested in tobacco companies – have now taken the step of blocking all student access to their records of investment. Lawrence Summers, the Jewish president of Harvard, has denounced "profoundly anti-Israel views" in "progressive intellectual communities", that are – I enjoyed this academic sleight of hand – "advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent".
Mr. Said himself has already described all this as a campaign "to ask students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom".

Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University College London, tells me that Oxfam has refused to accept £5,000 plus other royalties from his new book After the Terror following a campaign against him in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Now I happen to take issue with some of Professor Honderich's conclusions and I think his book – praised by the American-Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky – meanders. I especially don't like his assertion that Palestinians, in trying to free themselves from occupation, have a "moral right to terrorism". Blowing up children in pizzerias – and Professor Honderich's book is not an endorsement of such atrocities – is a crime against humanity. There is no moral right to do this. But what in God's name is Oxfam doing refusing Professor Honderich's money for its humanitarian work? Who was behind this?...

It is left, of course, to the likes of Uri Avneri in Israel to state that "the Sharon government is a giant laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitism virus". He rightly says that by smearing those who detest the persecution of the Palestinians as anti-Semites, "the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something approaching respectability".

But we can take comfort that 28 brave academics have signed a petition condemning President George Bush's build-up to war and Israel's support for it and warning that the Israeli government may be contemplating crimes against humanity on the Palestinians, including ethnic cleansing. Have Mr. Pipes and his chums put the names of these good men and women on their hate list? You bet they haven't. Because all of them are Israeli scholars at Israeli universities. I wonder why we weren't told about this.

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