Brumby must accept responsibility for his own poll ratings

• Rudd to blame for poor Vic poll: Brumby

  tags: politics, Brumby, Rudd
  

  • Victorian Premier John Brumby has blamed Labor's dismal performance in the latest opinion poll on the damage to the Labor brand under former prime minister Kevin Rudd.
  • Mr Brumby said issues within the party at a federal level had affected the result but would not say whether he expected his government's popularity to improve under Ms Gillard.

As another unelected leader like Julia Gillard, he would say that wouldn't he. Surely, it wouldn't have anything to do with his handling of the State's water supplies - or the standover tactics being used in Parliamentary inquiries - or the ongoing corruption allegations throughout the police system.

Greg's View of Todays News - 03/06/2009

• Keating identifies the elephant in the room

  Mr Keating said governments in the US, Britain and Australia had been right in implementing budget stimulus packages, even if they had erred on the side of doing too much.
  
  He told the forum, organised by the British high commission and international policy think tank the Lowy Institute, that countries that ran large external deficits-- such as Australia, Britain and the US - needed to save more.
  
  The recycling of Chinese savings into the US financial system had been the driving cause of the crisis, he said.

  • The US and Europe would need to cede political power to emerging powers such as China.
    

    "The room for the big confidence effects I think will come when people see that the world is going to be run differently," Mr Keating said.

    • ... and there is the 'elephant in the room'. Now that it has been identified, the rest of us have to come to terms with the fact that traditional market forces will not be allowed to find a solution to the crisis. Bring on the new world order! - post by gnaylor

• Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will try to get back millions in government aid to Pacific Brands

  THE federal government will try to retrieve taxpayers' money given to Pacific Brands in view of the company's decision to slash 1850 jobs, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

  • "I think what Pacific Brands has done is, frankly, in so many respects, beyond the pale,'' Mr Rudd said on Fairfax Radio Network.
    

    "In terms of the money they have got from the government, we will go through all of that in terms of what can be extracted back from them.''

    • The government should extract every last cent of taxpayer funding they can get - even to the extent of sending the company broke. Their survival is of no concern to the public. After all, if we continue to buy their products, it will be Chinese jobs that we are supporting - post by gnaylor
    
    
  • The collapse of Pacific Brands' share price in the past year could cost CEO Sue Morphet close to $1 million in payments.
    • ... and that would be a just reward for the CEO un-Australian approach to corporate greed. - post by gnaylor

• Printing money: £150 billion leap in the dark for Bank of England

  It pledged for the first time in its 315-year history to start effectively printing money as its main means of controlling the economy, warning that this was the only way to prevent the UK from suffering a lengthy recession and potentially becoming mired in deflation.
  
  The decision to create more cash, announced by Bank Governor Mervyn King and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling yesterday, is regarded as a last gasp measure for the authorities to prevent Britain from sliding into a 1930s-style depression.

  • 
    • How on earth can Gordon Brown simply print money to 'protect' the British economy and, at the same time, warn the United States againstt 'protectionism'?
      
      What hope is there when our leaders haven't got a clue? - post by gnaylor

• World Leaders are larger than life

  Barack Obama was wearing a stylish bulletproof suit when he took oath as the 44th President of the United States. Miguel Caballero, the famed Bulletproof Tailor of Bogota and the only company in the world to make them, has for years been designing high-end armoured fashion ware for the world's elite

  • It seems our world leaders are actually larger than life - with their bullet proof vests. Leaders like Mugabe and the President of Dafur appear to be stocky men - now it seems they are probably, and with good cause, wearing body armour - post by gnaylor
  • With a clientele that includes several world leaders and the wealthy elite, a company located in the kidnapping capital of the world is expected to take no chances.
    • It seems our world leaders are actually larger than life - with their bullet proof vests. Leaders like Mugabe and the war criminal President of Sudan appear to be stocky men - now it seems they are probably, and with good cause, wearing body armour - post by gnaylor

Greg's View of Todays News - 02/19/2009

• Move towards protectionism worries Crean - ABC News

  Federal Trade Minister Simon Crean says he is increasingly worried about moves towards protectionism as a result of the global financial downturn.

  
  

  • 
    • This is a bit like carbon trading - if we do it and the others don't, we are at an economic disadvantage.
    
    
    • With protectionism, if any government puts it's workers jobs in jeopardy, they had better expect rebellion of its workers.
      
    
    
    • Obama's move to buy American is the right thing to do by the American people - so what if other countries don't like it. Obama's job is to manage his own country.
    
    
    • Would we stand still if Kevin Rudd allowed foreign workers in to do our jobs for half the pay. Not bloody likely. - post by gnaylor
    
    
  • "If America starts closing off its markets for steel, why doesn't Korea, Japan, all of those countries start closing off markets to America?

• Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Greg's View of Todays News - 02/10/2009

• 
  

• BBC NEWS | Vow to rebuild fire-hit Australia

  Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has vowed his country would rally after the worst bushfires in its history.
  
  Mr Rudd told MPs that areas devastated by bushfires would be rebuilt "brick by brick" and "school by school".

  tags: press

  • Mr Rudd promised damaged communities would be rebuilt, and there would no limit on federal spending.

    "We have deliberately made the decision to place no cap on the Commonwealth's contribution to the recovery and reconstruction effort," he said.
    

    Although it would take time and effort, he added, "we will rebuild each of these communities... until one day we can look back and say these towns have been reborn".
    

  • Mr Rudd promised damaged communities would be rebuilt, and there would no limit on federal spending.

    What a great country this is. No limit on Federal spending. We are fortunate that this tragedy has occurred at a time when the government is trying to stimulate the economy.
    
    • Those with mortgages have compulsory insurance which will replace those houses.
      The government will hoefully replace all infrastructure, including commercial infrastructure, that is needed for any community to exist. - post by gnaylor
    
    

• Climate change will bring more extreme weather, say experts | Herald Sun

  

  Commenting on the Victorian fires, climatologist Professor David Karoly told the ABC's Lateline program last night that hot temperatures in Melbourne on Saturday and in many parts of southeastern Australia were "unprecedented".

  • "What we are seeing now is that the chances of these sorts of extreme fire weather situations are occurring much more rapidly in the last ten years due to climate change."
  • "We definitely need to change our habits so that we can leave our children and our children's children with a better world to live in," he said on Lateline.
    • I have been sitting on the fence with the need to adapt to Climate Change ... until NOW!.
      The highest temperature EVER recorded in Victoris together with the most lives EVER lost to bushfires - on the same day - leaves no room for doubt. - post by gnaylor
  • Victorian Premier John Brumby said a royal commission would investigate every aspect of the Victorian bushfires, including the possibility of greater danger resulting from climate change.
    • The Royal Commission must investigate the new phenonomen of 'spontaneous combuation' where housed exploded from within and evaluate the right of a landowner to stay and protect his/her assets to give the CFA/Police the power to clear the area before the fire arrives - post by gnaylor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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• Australian PM: Wildfire arson is mass murder
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• Scientists Link Climate Change and Wildfires
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• How Global Warming May Be Fueling Australia's Fires

Greg's View of Todays News - 02/09/2009

• BBC NEWS | Marijuana testicular cancer link

  • Frequent or long-term marijuana use may raise a man's risk of testicular cancer, American research suggests.
    

    The study of 369 men, published in the journal Cancer, found being a regular marijuana user doubled the risk compared to those who never smoked it.
    

  • 
    • Well there you go.
      As an advanced prostate cancer sufferer, my research has shown cannabis to be an effective pain management tool. As I never smoked the stuff as a young man, I guess I am pretty well protected against testicular cancer ;) - post by gnaylor
  • Known risk factors for the cancer include previous injuries to the testicles, a family history of the disease, or suffering from undescended testicles as a young child.
  
  
  • 
  
  

• Rudd angrily denounces 'mass murder' arsonists - ABC News

  An emotional Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has warned Australians to brace for more bad news in the wake of the weekend's lethal bushfires across Victoria, which are known to have killed 108 people.
  
  He has also described the lighting of fires as "mass murder" in the wake of the confirmation from Victorian Police that they are treating some fire-affected areas as crime scenes to determine if they were deliberately lit.

  • 

  • And he lashed out at anyone who may have been responsible for lighting the fires, which have destroyed more than 750 homes.

    "What do you say about anyone like that? What do you say? I don't know," he said.
    • Those who deliberately start these fires must be punished to the extent of the law. It that means 'wasting' a young (or older) life with a penalty of life improsonment, so be it!. They should be charged under our terrorism laws where the penalties are the most severe.
      
      What if the wrong person is convicted? Until that can be proven, let them rot in prison for the sake of the community at large. We got it wrong with Dr Haneef - but that was ultimately rectified. - post by gnaylor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Two charged with arson after deadly Australian wildfires (telegraph.co.uk)
• Australia fire toll 'to increase' (news.bbc.co.uk)

Australian Prime Minister calls for New World Order

Gais, Switzerland

A Daily Compendium of Free-Market Analysis

Appenzer Daily Bell • Issue 198 • Tuesday, February 03, 2009

"It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder.." - Frederick Bastiat

Australian PM calls for New World Order

Getty Images

Kevin Rudd has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of "social capitalism" in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily. In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis. "The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market. - Sydney Morning Herald

Dominant Social Theme: New Labour will have its day.

Free-Market Analysis: So who is Kevin Rudd? He is a center left politician and Prime Minister of Australia, a country that does not quite have the clout of Britain within the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence, but which is nonetheless a dynamic and important adjunct. Here is a little of what Wikipedia has to say:

Kevin Michael Rudd (born 21 September 1957) is the 26th and current Prime Minister of Australia and federal leader of the centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP). Under Rudd's leadership, the Labor Party won the 2007 federal election on 24 November against the incumbent centre-right Liberal/National coalition government led by John Howard (see Howard Government). The Rudd Ministry was sworn in by the Governor-General, Michael Jeffery, on 3 December 2007.

The SMH article, excerpted above, in its entirety is filled with one odd factoid after another. But we find it interesting because we've been waiting for a statement about how the center-left leaders that run most of the world's Western governments these days are going to deal with the financial crisis. After all, as one of American President Barack Obama's top aides reportedly put it, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

By reading a variety of tea leaves we have come to expect that suggestions for a new financial order will be rolled out by the suddenly authoritative G20 (group or gang - whatever - of 20 industrial nations) that was supposed to have a meeting in February. Now the next big meeting is supposedly set for April. But we think Kevin Rudd has given us a taste of what is to come. And, yes, we expected it because the gentlemen involved (mostly male, anyway) will want to float a variety of trial balloons in advance of any authoritative statements. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did so recently at Davos - along with Angela Merkel and others - though his presentation was marred by the ring, several times, of his own cell-phone. An omen?

Anyway, Brown was a bit vague and Rudd seems a tad more specific. But the arguments he makes are truly political ones, in that they do not seem grounded so much in the facts as in polemics. Here's some more of what he had to say, courtesy of the Sydney Herald:

He argues that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do" and advocates a new system that reaches beyond the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes. "A system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate," he writes. He urges "a new contract for the future that eschews the extremism of both the left and right". He mocks neo-liberals "who now find themselves tied in ideological knots in being forced to rely on the state they fundamentally despise to save financial markets from collapse".

He advocates tighter regulation and policing of global finances, and identifies the immediate challenge as restoring global growth by 3 per cent of gross domestic product, the amount it is expected to fall in 2009. Next week, as Parliament resumes, his Government will chip in with a second economic stimulus package. Mr Rudd commits to keeping budgets in surplus "over the cycle", meaning deficits should be temporary. In a further sign the Government is not contemplating additional tax cuts, which would deliver a permanent hit to revenue, he stresses that stimulus measures have to be paid for when the economy recovers.

Mr. Rudd singles out Thatcherism as a culprit, as well as the former Howard government. His essay implicitly attacks the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, who this week urged the free market be allowed to dictate commercial property values as he slammed a Government measure to prop them up. Mr. Rudd's essay follows the blast Mr. Obama gave Wall Street bankers yesterday for awarding themselves $28 billion in bonuses last year at the same time as they were being bailed out by taxpayers. In a message to Mr. Obama and the US Congress, Mr. Rudd counseled against erecting trade barriers. "Soft or hard, protectionism is a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression as it exacerbates the collapse in global demand."

So there it is in one package. Rudd and those with his point of view - and that would seem to include many of the world's leaders including those in Russia and China - believe that more regulation is certainly necessary and that government has a vital role to play not only in stabilizing economies but also in reducing "inequalities" that the market inevitably generates.

But Rudd makes arguments in our opinion that are straw men, easy to erect and easy to knock down. The main problem is Rudd identifies the enemy as neo-conservatives and politicians like Margaret Thatcher. In fact, American neo-cons are in favor of an activist military, an activist federal government of great power and do not seek change in central banking or the expanding, global financial system. Margaret Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, did much to disenfranchise the worst of the Western welfare state, but had nothing to say when it came to the world's banking monopoly.

Rudd would have us believe that it is market capitalism that has brought us to this place. In fact, it is the money press of central banking that inflated the markets of the Western world over decades. The collapse has been sudden, but fiat money collapses usually are. The solutions that Rudd and others are suggesting have little or nothing to do with the problem. They are answers to difficulties that do not exist.

Conclusion: Rudd, Brown - and soon the entire G20 - will eventually issue a call to arms that will require a good deal more government involvement in Western financial affairs. There has even been talk of setting up a United Nations' financial office to oversee new regulations (see other article).

Once upon a time, a 20th century Bretton Woods agreement placed the world on a quasi-gold standard and crowned the dollar as the global currency reserve. This new-style Bretton Woods will call perhaps for a diminished dollar reserve currency and much expanded regulatory powers for national and international financial agencies. Since these solutions have absolutely nothing to do with the real problem, which is central banking money stimulation, it is a fair to ask why such measures are being advanced. Also: whom do they benefit?