IS IT A SYMBOL? IS IT A SIGN? INDIA’S LIGHTS GOING OUT?

by James Reed
The mainstream media typically dealt with the India blackout crisis, which left about half of India without power, generally by claiming that it’s just a glitch and has given the governments the incentive to change. But an alternative point of view sees the blackout as a symbol of the type of infrastructural chaos that characterises India. You can use Google to look at amazing pictures of powerlines on Indian streets which look like jungles.

Video: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story”. Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare....Article: here
How long can the cardinals of the corporate gospel buy up our protests? Arundati Roy tells the real story of the growth of Capitalism in modern India, a nation of 1.2 billion where the 100 richest Indians own assets equivalent to one quarter of India’s GDP. The super-rich live the same life as the super-rich in the West, but the poorest Indians lack even clean and safe drinking water and sanitation.

As in the West, a handful of corporations run India, and, as in the West, they tell government what they want, and they get it. Everything has been privatised, as here. And the banks.
Roy might be describing Australia:
“Weak corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, Agro-business Corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracks of land” and water too.

All of this foreign investment has not generated local jobs: “After 20 years of growth” 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganised sector.”
As but one example of the misery that corporate technocracy has brought to India, the coercion of Indian farmers to use genetically engineered seeds has led to the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. Over a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide over the past 15 years as their crops failed, largely as a result of genetically engineered seed such as Bt cotton.

Bt cotton is more expensive than traditional cotton, uses more water and requires more pesticides – and has not achieved the promised increased crop yields that Big Agri promised. This has now been called “GM genocide”.
India will not become a new United States. Like China and the rest of the world, including Australia, there is no long-term future in a world made for the destruction of Life.

NOW GET READY FOR AMERICAN WORKERS

by Chris Knight
As an American I have the politically correct right to be critical of America and Americans, so here! The headline “Union Bid to Import US Workers” (The Australian 18 July 2012, pp.1, 6) attracted my attention. It seems that the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, “One of the nation’s biggest unions is negotiating to import up to 2000 skilled workers from the US on temporary visas, declaring unions will be unable to “hold back the tide” of foreigners needed to plug skill shortages on multi-billion-dollar resources projects.” A company directly related to the union is already assessing workers in the US and this has been approved by the Federal government.

Unions came into existence to prevent the undercutting of local wages and/or the taking away of jobs by foreigners. The declaration that unions will be unable to “hold back the tide” of foreign workers, is just the “Logic” used by global capitalism to continually hold countries open to mass migration. If that is the union’s position, then it is simply not a union, and has stopped championing the cause of Australian workers. But this is something in general that the union movement long ago ceased to do.

It is unfortunate that the Australian people have been manipulated into taking sides in party-politics with the worker having a bias against the self-employed and small business. This has allowed the Left, which has a symbiotic relationship with global capitalism, to dominate working class politics. The ‘self-employed and small business’ side of politics needs to address the needs of the working class as well.

Comment: Chris, it seems to me there are too many ‘union leaders’ who have used the Australian worker to further their own ambitions – they climbed on the backs of the workers as their 'ladder to success'. I can think of two former politicians from both ‘sides’ of parliament who are now ‘busily running around’ selling off portions of this great land to foreigners – and all for making a profit. Both ‘sides’ of politics have a symbiotic relationship with Global Capitalism.  

THANKS GO TO THE GALILEO MOVEMENT FOF THESE VIDEOS

A Carbon Dioxide.

Carbon Tax Corruption Scandal; Part 1 - series Introduction.

Carbon Tax Corruption Scandal; Part 2 - Rogues Gallery

THAT’S THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM: NO EXPANSE OF GREEN SHALL REMAIN

by Brian Simpson
Queensland Premier Campbell Newman’s plan to repeal the State’s Wild Rivers legislation has been greeted with joy by farmers who have enough money to farm cattle using helicopters (and engine overhaul every 75 hours flying time – big money). Traditional owners, the Aborigines of Cape York, want bauxite mining developed. Development is going to be fast-tracked. Thus indigenous leaders have joined with Big Business so that economic development will deal with “social dysfunction” and welfare dependency. I will believe it when I see it.

It may be good insofar as farmers will be able to control weeds better and put up fences, but in the long run, this is just Capitalism’s relentless march to destroy any expanse of green. Give it a decade or so and Cape York will look like the Martian landscape.

What a pity it is for the global capitalists that Earth looks like the only planet in the solar system practically suitable for Life. But the cancer of Capitalism will die long before the planet dies. Instead of wailing about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, the Greens should have been attacking the reductive economic materialism of Capitalism. Then they would have been more than merely useless idiots.  

AS FOR THAT OTHER ‘ECONOMIC MIRACLE’

Andrew Bolt, 14 August 2012, wrote of Mark Kitto, the Englishman who, having spent many years in China and married a Chinese wife, has finally “fallen out of love” with the place. “You’ll Never Be Chinese” – read here. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/

Andrew Bolt: “Mark Kitto has for years written a fascinating column from his Moganshan coffee shop after his publishing business was stolen by the Chinese Government. But after 16 years he is leaving: I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream… The threat is China’s rising paranoia:
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof... But there is nowhere to put it except into property or under the mattress.... The result is the biggest property bubble in history… If an outburst of ethnic or labour discontent coincides with the collapse of the property market, and you throw in a scandal like the melamine tainted milk of 2008… suddenly the harmonious society is likely to become a chorus of discontent…

It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear.... (But) China, politically, culturally and as a society, is inward looking. It does not welcome intruders… Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise…

The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones. The Party’s propaganda arm created the term “one hundred years of humiliation” to define the period from the Opium Wars to the Liberation, when foreign powers did indeed abuse and coerce a weak imperial Qing government.... To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.

The alternative scenario to a world dominated by an aggrieved China is hardly less bleak… That is the increasing likelihood that there will be upheaval in China within the next few years, sparked by that property crash… Some commentators say it will lead to revolution, or a collapse of the state… I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines…”  

CHRIS KNIGHT SPEAKS TOO SCATHINGLY ABOUT CHINESE CIVILISATION

- - Nigel Jackson, Belgrave Victoria.
Dear Editor, Chris Knight speaks too scathingly about Chinese civilisation ('On Target', 10/8). He should begin by reading Robert Temple's 'The Genius of China' which massively refutes his downplaying of Chinese science and technology. Then he could look at Eric Voegelin's chapter on 'The Chinese Ecumene' in 'The Ecumenic Age' (Vol. 4 of 'Order and History'), Rene Guenon's profound study of the sacred tradition of Taoism in 'The Great Triad' and Carl Jung's analysis of the different kind of science of the 'peculiar Chinese mind' and its 'chief concern' with 'coincidence' or 'synchronicity' in his foreword to Richard Wilhelm's 'I Ching - or book of changes'.

Finally he could contemplate the great range of masterpieces of painting and poetry produced by Chinese artists under the Ming and Tang dynasties. Unfortunately traditional China succumbed to a European heresy (communism), so that the wisdom of Taoism and the ethics of Confucianism could not resist a decline into money-based authoritarianism. Hence the tyranny that attacked Tibet.

In Australia, for all the greatness of our own British and Christian culture, based on an amalgam of themes from ancient Egypt, Hebrew writings, classical Greece and Rome and the pre-Christian, goddess-worshipping peoples of northern Europe, we still have much to learn from China and should treat this great people with proper admiration and respect. Paying homage to their wonderful spiritual and artistic achievements is one way of helping them free themselves from the severity of their current political order.

Editor’s comment: Nigel Jackson’s plea for admiration and respect for traditional Chinese civilisation reminds me of Clifford Douglas’ response to an appeal made in the House of Lords, many years ago, for a return to the Christian Ethic and the Golden Rule. It was similar to a recent appeal by the present Archbishop of Canterbury.

Douglas went straight to crux of the matter: “Within the appeal there is the little recognised, but huge problem that needed to be resolved. It is the Policy of the Philosophy which is important… it is the evidence of things as yet unseen. This country is not now the Policy of a Christian Philosophy, and, before it can again, as an organisation, put into practice those Christian principles, for which the Earl appealed, it must understand their application through proper mechanisms.”

“With some hesitation”, he wrote, “I suggest that the question arising out of the Christian Church, is not the same, either in nature or degree, as that involved in the acceptance of what is nowadays vaguely called Christianity… It is the Doctrine of the Incarnation.

At bottom, what we have to make up our minds upon, is whether human political action is subject to the same kind, or some kind, of compulsion to be "right" - as we accept in doing a multiplication sum, and if so, whether the Christian Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is, today, the living incarnation of that "right "-ness… Failing that, the children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of Light.”

Douglas, an engineer, used the law of thermo-dynamics to illustrate his point. The law may be known, and quoted ad infinitum, but until it is put into practise – through mechanisms such as aeroplanes… it is just words. It is the practical application that is important... it is the incarnation of the theory, the idea, the belief.

Policies based on the Christian faith over the centuries gave rise to a social structure in which there was the slow, but steady development towards the decentralisation of power in the fields of politics and economics (national housekeeping). With the betrayal of the people by their political and religious ‘leaders’ both the Chinese people and the Australian people (and the Indian people) need to realise that reality - and look for mechanisms to incarnate the policy of the philosophy once again.  

AUSSIE BROKER BLOWS WHISTLE ON SUB-PRIME PONZI SCHEME

7.30 Report by Stephen Long - Broker blows whistle on sub-prime scandal:
A West Australia mortgage broker who got rich by "fudging figures" has blown the whistle on the banks that conspired in Australia's own sub-prime mortgage scandal.

In 2007 Kate Thompson was WA mortgage broker of the year. Now she is facing fraud charges. It is alleged Mortgage Miracles, in Canning Vale in Western Australia, obtained investment loans for customers by using falsely inflated earnings and assets.

Ms Thompson admits that is exactly what she did: "I would get upfront commission, I would get a trailing commission. I was probably earning about $5 million a year. It was great. It was wonderful. But it was all a lie," she said. But she was not alone.

"Hook me up to a lie detector test and hook them up. I'll lay my evidence on the table. They will fail a lie detector test miserably. They are corrupt. They are protecting each other," Ms Thompson said. Along with similar claims before a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra last week, her evidence has the potential to rock the finance industry.

"Through a series of emails from banks to brokers how to get their deals across the line, make the deal fit. They targeted older people, people on carers allowance, age pensions," Denise Brailey, from the Banking and Finance Consumers Support Association, told the inquiry.

Kate Thompson: The evidence suggests that banks and other lenders tacitly encouraged mortgage brokers en masse to make up fictitious stories about customers so they could get loans and to falsify their income. "I do not think there was a bank or non-bank lender that wasn't doing it. From my files alone, I am certain I could evidence every single bank," Ms Thomson said.

The allegations centre on low-doc loans. They were initially designed for the self-employed and small business people - recognising that they can lack documents such as pay slips, group certificates and the certainty of income banks demand for conventional lending.

But low docs became a free-for-all. "They were very tight to begin with but eventually they were absolutely shocking, no rules at all, tell us what we want to hear, tell us anything," Ms Thompson said. As banks competed aggressively to sell their loans, the pitch to the brokers was persuasive.

"I received 4,000 emails, and in those emails from the banks to the brokers you'd see clearly bank officers instructing the brokers how to have no-loan mortgage insurance, no income necessary, no assets and liability, virtually just get a signature on a document, send it in and we'll give this person, no matter what their income or affordability criteria is, give them a $500,000 loan," Ms Brailey said. Ms Brailey says it is a "roll call" of all the major banks. "We've got Macquarie in there, we've got Westpac, NAB, ANZ, Commonwealth," she said.

Ms Brailey has dedicated herself to exposing the scandal. I received 4,000 emails and in those emails from the banks to the brokers you'd see clearly bank officers instructing the brokers how to have no-loan mortgage insurance, no income necessary, no assets and liability, virtually just get a signature on a document, send it in and we'll give this person, no matter what their income or affordability criteria is, give them a $500,000 loan.

Denise Brailey: She says people could have an ABN number for one day and get low-doc loans which were meant for business people. "That is the whole point of why we are saying it was so fraudulent; low docs were supposed to be for two years, self-employed and here they are saying ignore that, even if they are a pensioner, by going online and getting them an ABN number and putting that number on the form," she said. "They can get these low-doc loans supposedly for business people... Yes, the bank would automatically approve it."

Ms Thomson says in her eight years of finance broking, she only ever met one person who was genuinely self-employed for one day. "In reality they were nothing of the sort," she said. "They were just old people who didn't do much more in their day than cook their dinner and do a bit of gardening, and yet I had to present them as a professional something, anything."

'Hopeless situation': On the Pacific Highway just south of Newcastle in New South Wales is the home of Michelle Matheson, a single mother of three.
A few years ago, juggling bills, she contacted a local business that said it could help people manage their money. The adviser who saw her was in fact a mortgage broker. "He took me down the path of purchasing a home I guess, unfortunately, the journey along the way has been quite abhorrent," Ms Matheson said.

She says she was told to buy a home, despite at the time being a single parent, working part-time, and earning around $24,000 a year. The loan application, which she only received recently, said Ms Matheson was a self-employed professional and grossly overstated her income. "My income has been stated, not obviously by myself, but either by the broker or somebody at the bank, has been stated to be $75,000 per year," she said.

Ms Matheson named her house Hope, but she admits her situation was hopeless. I've taken on two to three jobs at a time, I work up to 90-hour weeks. I've sold everything to make mortgage payments. I've got credit card debt of close to $30,000 because I've had to put mortgage repayments on them.
Ms Matheson's mother took out a second mortgage on her home to help Michelle get the loan. She has had to sell and now lives in a demountable in a caravan park.

The stories of other people caught up in the low-doc loan scandal all have similar themes. "If you can't trust your bank manager, then who can you trust?" Barbara Flowers of Brisbane said. "Exactly the same thing's happened to all of us.
"Somebody in the head office said, 'Mrs Flowers, I've no idea how you got into this mess, you have $750,000 worth or shares and you have got $13,000 worth of income from rental properties you have rented out'. "And I said, 'well if you can find it, I'll give you half of it because it doesn't exist'."

Royal commission: Ms Brailey says there needs to be a royal commission into the banking sector. She says she has received about 500 loan application forms from people in trouble with low-doc loans and not one is clean. "The figures fudged, the details forged, by brokers or bank officers themselves," she said. These people are losing their homes. There is nothing I can do now except tell it like it is.

Kate Thompson: Ms Thompson recalls the tricks banks taught brokers to get loans across the line, such as calling rising house prices "income". "So when we were putting down a customers income we are - we were - allowed to use capital growth. It's projected income, it's not disposable income but we were allowed to use it," she said.

She says banks were targeting pensioners, people who were asset rich, but income poor. "Six or seven of those bank officers actually used to come into my office and write up the applications themselves," Ms Thompson said. "Fudged figures... they make it fit, and that's what they were telling us to do and they were prepared to it themselves, they were doing it themselves, they knew the game."These people are losing their homes. There is nothing I can do now except tell it like it is."

More on Derivative Ponzi Schemes in the New Times Survey here…

CONTINUING DRAMA ON LARRY PICKERING’S FACEBLOG

Is our Prime Minister a Crook? Part 2:
Gillard’s old enemies are singing like canaries. They have seen the whites of her eyes and they are moving in for the kill. Her enemies are former AWU officials and staff. Salivating ex-employees of her fraudster boyfriend, Bruce Wilson. They have a conscience and a clear, corroborated recollection of exactly what went on. They are willing to testify.

Wilson’s tenure as Secretary of the Vic. AWU, while living with Julia Gillard, is pock-marked with secret commissions and union extortion rackets inflicted on developers. Wilson, at the same time he was living with Gillard, was also in a “close relationship” with another woman, attractive AWU book-keeper Marie Murray. (Ms Murray was a respondent in the successful litigation in the Federal Court to have Wilson and others repay $114,000 to the AWU.) The figure was the amount that Wilson had paid himself and others in false “redundancy entitlements”. That Court Order was ignored by Wilson and never enforced by senior AWU Officials.

Concurrently, Wilson was in yet another “close relationship”... this time with Julia Gillard’s best friend, AWU Industrial Officer, Robyn McCleod. Gillard, even now, may not be aware of this. AWU staff confirm the tryst. [At the invitation of Gillard, Ms McCleod, on June 26, 2010, flew to Canberra to join the celebration of Gillard’s ascension to Prime Minister. In April of the same year, Gillard was a witness to Ms McCleod’s marriage.]

A failed Labor candidate for the seat of Mordialloc (despite Gillard being her campaign manager) McCleod was branded a liar when caught out double dealing in South Australia. At the same time she was contracted to the SA Rann Labor Government as Water Security Commissioner. She later admitted to lying about an improper connection with Canberra. McCleod had previously negotiated the Melbourne Water/Thiess contract for Wilson. The Commonwealth Bank account used for this little extortion racket was already set up as the “AWU Welfare Account”. This account was a long-standing slush fund union officials used to buy votes in union elections. Bruce Wilson was a signatory to it. It was now to be used for something far more sinister.

Wilson began invoicing and receiving funds from various companies, including Thiess Contractors. Joe Trio, Manager of WA Thiess Contractors and Wilson’s brother-in-law, appeared removed from the Victorian scam. One cheque we can identify was for “services rendered” and amounted to $14,000.00, notated as 390 hours worked.
Services were never rendered nor were hours worked but there were verbal assurances given by Wilson to a range of construction companies that there would be industrial peace if certain sums were paid to the “AWU Welfare” account. Those sums were paid on the pretext of “services rendered”. The companies enjoyed industrial peace for the duration of those projects.

Wilson’s stolen funds were mixed in with accounts that held union dues. Union dues do not attract tax. They were then withdrawn by Wilson in a tax free bonanza. Wilson had successfully duplicated his WA extortion racket in Victoria... with the assistance of Gillard and Slater & Gordon.

Gillard had sought ALP pre-selection many times and was unsuccessful, even in marginal seats. Pre-selection committees balked at her shady alliance with Wilson and McCleod, and for good reason.

In Part 3, the story’s serpentine plot winds its way to the Office of Prime Minster. Gillard’s claim that she was unaware of Wilson’s activities will be discounted as rubbish. Slater & Gordon and Gillard are assisting Wilson in disposing of the WA extorted funds. The ongoing scam has appeared all too easy for too long, now it begins to unravel. Monies are returned to developers in a desperate attempt to cover tracks.
When the proverbial hits the inevitable fan Gillard panics, Wilson does a runner and the hapless Blewitt disappears but not before big name players like Nicola Roxon, Bill Shorten and many others become indelibly embroiled. The final of many acts is yet to be played out.  

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN SEMINAR AND DINNER

We will not only be celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with Archbishop John Hepworth as guest speaker at the Frank Bawden Memorial Dinner, but also honouring the life of C.H. Douglas, the founder of the Social Credit movement who passed away 60 years ago this year.

Seminar speakers will be:
Mrs Betty Luks, "Why Social Credit?"
Archbishop John Hepworth, "Australia: A Vision Splendid"
League’s National Director, Louis Cook, "How a Social Crediter Deals with Local Councils"

Make note of the date in your diary – Saturday 25th August.
Registration from 12.15 pm. Welcome and Introduction 12.45 pm.
Frank Bawden Memorial Dinner: 6.30pm.
Venue will be The Public Schools' Club, 207 East Terrace (cnr. Carrington St.) Adelaide.

THE LEAGUE'S NATIONAL WEEKEND

The following details are for the National Weekend events:
* "New Times" Dinner Friday 28th September 2012 (Bendigo Motor Inn, 232 High St. Kangaroo Flat)
* National Seminar Saturday 29th September 2012
* Divine Service and Action Conference Sunday 30th September 2012 (Bendigo Motor Inn, 232 High St. Kangaroo Flat)

Venue: The Seminar (ONLY) ALL SEASONS MOTEL, McIvor Road, Bendigo
Coming from Melbourne: From central Fountain, into Pall Mall then turn right into McIvor Road

To Book Your ACCOMMODATION:
The Bendigo Motor Inn, 232 High St. Kangaroo Flat, 3555 gave us very good service last year so we are pleased to return. The Bendigo Motor Inn, (Service Rd. on left of Calder Hwy if driving north), is a 10 minute walk from Kangaroo Flat Station, or, take a taxi from Bendigo Central.

Bookings can be made now: Phone 1800 032 941
Room Prices:
D/R Friday night: $91.10 : Saturday night $114.50 : Sunday night $91.10 A number of rooms have been reserved for us, so book early to secure one and pay Motel at the Seminar.
Cancellation policy: rooms cancelled within 24 hours of booked day must be paid for.