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Saturday, 31st January 1998
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Archive of weekly features: [The Canberra Column] [Economic Rationalism]
Franklins Hong Kong behind the Webb Dock fiasco?
We have heard from reliable but unverified sources through the Internet that the multinational group Franklins based in Hong Kong is behind the NFF's drive to establish a union free port facility.
Now I personally agree that the Maritime Union of Australia membership's incredible salary packages are based on thuggery and threat - and that is bad.... but where does the new P&C Stevedoring company get Au$100 million to fight for the establishment of a dockyard facility.
It certainly can't be from the hard pressed farmers of Australia.
The word I have received is that Franklins want to establish their own entry to Australia - not for exports - but for cheap Asian imports - with the exorbitant dockyard costs being cut and, subsequently, the multinational being able to take a hold on a whole range of imports into Australia.
Frightening stuff when you consider MAI and other treaties and agreements aimed at usurping Australian's democratic freedom.
One Nation's National Director David Ettridge again targeted by the Australia-Israeli Review
Last year we wrote about the Australia-Israeli Review personally targeting David Ettridge over his finances and other issues. Now it appears the Jewish media have targeted Ettridge once again making allegations of a "temporary bankruptcy" that he rectified within weeks when in 1992 the Australian tax Office (ATO) claimed unpaid taxes.
However as Ettridge said, "The annulment took place and it was not a true bankruptcy. At no time did my liabilities ever look like exceeding my assets."
Interesting that Kerry Packer has not been targeted by the ATO despite a tax bill of about Au$150 million remaining unpaid. What makes this particular story distasteful is that Pater Hayden, once a supporter of One Nation at Kingaroy, has been the man running to the media telling the tale based on the article by the Australia-Isreali Review.
Pauline Hanson once again confirmed her complete confidence in David Ettridge while in Kingaroy. She took the time there to have a go at Queensland State Premier Rob Borbidge who has been behind secret funding of native-title claims while claiming to campaign against native title rights.
"We have Rob Borbidge shouting people are sick and tired of the unreasonable demands of the land rights industry while at the same time he and his government are funding research for what in his own words are 'unreasonable demands'."
Borbidge was rattled and refused to comment to the media on Hanson's comments "as a matter of policy".
How much is an Australian worth?
In this wonderfully mixed up world of "globalisation" that we live in Australians feature right at the bottom of the list as far as the elected government is concerned.
Australia has announced several times over the last few months billions of dollars of currency swaps to help the flailing Asian nations to our north. The only politician who has taken a stand has been Pauline Hanson who had this to say about our multi-billion dollar loans to Indonesia, "President Suharto has been in power for over thirty years and during that time he and his family have profited billions, much of it under circumstances that would not be allowed in Australia. Given the current state of affairs in Indonesia perhaps Suharto should not be looking abroad for a donation or a loan - perhaps it is time President Suharto gave some of his own money back to his own people."
The only reason Australia did this was because the International Monetary Fund (IMF) TOLD US TO.... didn't ask us mind you... TOLD US. And the wimps we call politicians, the Howard's, Beazley's, Evan's and Downer's of this nation strut the world stage like a bunch of pumped up fairies bowing and scraping to their own political agendas while gutsy Pauline Hanson is called uninformed and stupid by a biased media.
The outcome? When Prime Minister John Howard visited the flooded town of Catherine yesterday he promised to give each adult Au$1,000 and each child Au$200 - if their homes were and lives were devastated by the floods.
Howard said, "I want you all to know the people of Australia are feeling for you and I want to help and will extend the hand of friendship and the hand of assistance to you."
When you add up the financial costs of bailing out our Asian "neighbours" it comes to about Au$500 for every man, woman and child in Australia - yet when you have Australian taxpayers wiped out by floods the response from the top is a paltry figure that would not even cover the costs of cleaning out what is left of their homes.
Makes you sick - but just goes to show you how dishonest and unrepresentative the major parties are of the people they purport to represent.
The following article is a real eye opener as you will begin to see that with "globalisation" we are nothing more than a resource like gold, timber or wheat to the multinationals... except that we are the new age slaves to their system.
On the Table: Reform of the Global Finance System.
This excellent article sums up what a mess the International Monetary Fund have made of Asia.
The question is, "Was it deliberate or accidental?" If you look at what is going on with MAI you can't help but believe that it is the former.
Few people have a better understanding of the world's free-wheeling financial markets -- or have made more money in them -- than George Soros and Robert E. Rubin. But now, in the midst of the Asian financial crisis, the famed speculator and the U.S. treasury secretary have concluded that the system is broke and needs fixing.
"The private sector is ill-suited to allocate international credit," Soros wrote in a recent article for London's Financial Times. "It provides either too little or too much."
Rubin, in a speech last week at Georgetown University, said the Asian crisis demonstrates that markets cannot be trusted to correct their own excesses and called on governments to step in and "modernise the architecture" of international finance.
All this should come into sharper focus this morning on Capitol Hill as the House banking committee opens hearings on the Clinton administration's request for $18 billion in additional U.S. funding for the International Monetary Fund, the organisation set up 50 years ago to be the balance wheel for the global financial system.
With Americans increasingly sceptical about the benefits of free trade and free markets and wary of taxpayer bailouts for big banks and wealthy investors, even the IMF's staunchest defenders in Congress now concede it is unlikely the funding will be approved without restructuring the IMF and rewriting the rules of global capitalism. But Rubin and other experts warn that the hard part will be to tinker with the intricate machinery of global finance without inadvertently gumming up the works.
What follows is a quick review of four of the most talked-about ideas:
Loan insurance. When the IMF shows up with a loan to keep a country from going into default -- and protect the crisis from spreading to other countries -- it often has the effect of protecting foreign bankers from the full consequences of their imprudent loans. In the process, it sends a signal to bankers everywhere that they can overlend and make risky loans elsewhere, knowing that if things get real bad, the IMF will bail them out.
One solution, proposed by Soros, is to recognise the necessity of such interventions but require the banks to pay for it themselves through an insurance scheme. Soros envisions a new International Credit Insurance Corp., operating alongside the IMF, that would charge a small fee on every international bank loan and use the proceeds to finance any rescues.
The new agency also would set ceilings on how much lending to insure for any one country and set minimum standards for bank regulation in any country that receives insured loans.
Economists say the insurance idea faces a number of practical problems. Governments might resist the idea of an international agency imposing credit quotas and international regulation of their banks.
William Cline, managing director of the Institute for International Finance, argues that the biggest problem with Soros's plan is that borrowers and lenders know that, when push comes to shove, the IMF is likely to rescue banks even in countries that don't participate in the insurance scheme, if only to protect economies and banking systems elsewhere.
The incentive, said Cline, will be for the riskiest lenders and borrowers to go without insurance.
The Tobin tax. One reason for the wild swings in global financial markets -- and the need for IMF bailouts -- may be that it has become easy and costless to exchange one currency for another. James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, suggests throwing some sand in the gears of this process by imposing a universal tax on currency transactions.
Peter Kenan, an economist at Princeton University, says the biggest problem with the Tobin tax is that it won't work if one or two countries decide not to impose the tax and set themselves up as foreign exchange havens. And even if the tax could be universal, Brown University economist Peter Garber predicts financial engineers on Wall Street will come up with fancy new financial derivatives that could allow traders to speculate in currencies without actually owning them.
Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, has questioned the very premise of the Tobin tax. While there is some currency speculation that contributes to market instability -- the traders who, herdlike, follow the momentum of the market wherever it leads -- there is also speculative trading by contrarians that actually helps to stabilise markets. A shortcoming of the Tobin tax, Eichengreen argues, is that it fails to distinguish between good speculation and bad.
Hot money tax. A big part of the Asian crisis is that the region's banks got much of their money not from local depositors but by borrowing, short-term, from foreign banks. When some of those foreign lenders decided to pull their money, the Asian banks found themselves caught in a squeeze between their short-term borrowing and the long-term loans they had made with that money.
Chile has tried to reduce this risk by requiring its banks and corporations to put $1 in the Chilean central bank for every $3 they borrow from abroad. The central bank holds the money for a year without paying interest, which effectively acts like a tax on short-term foreign borrowing. So far, say economists, the program has accomplished its goal with few negative side effects.
Other economists note that if the goal is to slow down the flows of short-term capital, it is perhaps even more important to prevent people and corporations inside developing countries from moving their money outside the country, as happened in many Asian countries. Along those lines, Eichengreen has proposed that countries adopt a similar deposit requirement covering investments and loans outside its borders.
International bankruptcy. One reason foreign investors rush to abandon troubled economies at the first sign of trouble is that there is no international equivalent of the bankruptcy laws. That certainly was the case in Asia where, according to a study released yesterday by the Institute of International Finance, banks and stock market investors withdrew $33 billion last year from Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Without a bankruptcy mechanism, economists explain, lenders have every incentive to call in their loans quickly, before the country runs out of money and leaves less fleet-footed lenders facing total loss. With a bankruptcy process, lenders are apt to be more patient, knowing that all creditors will be treated equally as part of a negotiated restructuring process.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Harvard University, has recommended that the IMF require countries to submit to some form of international bankruptcy as a condition for receiving IMF assistance. And Sachs predicts that, with a bankruptcy mechanism in its portfolio of options, the IMF could rely more on private capital for its rescue package by decreeing that banks that provide new loans to a distressed country would be repaid before the old creditors -- a standard technique used to reorganise corporations under U.S. bankruptcy laws.
Last year, however, a committee appointed by finance ministers of the industrialised countries concluded Sach's idea probably wouldn't work. One reason is that while many corporate restructurings involve exchanging debt for stock in the company, there is no way for a Thailand to offer stock in a country.
Making the
news" -
Subject: (Fwd) MAI negotiations 9 February Paris
Dear Editor,
The message "forwarded" below was posted by Canadian opponent of MAI, Andrea Durbin. Its opening statements and purpose are in quotes",,". I trust you will help make it possible for your readers to take the opportunity that seems to be offered. I am unable to guarantee it is a bona fide opportunity but feel it is surely worth a try..
" In the next few weeks the political representatives of the OECD(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) will be meeting(the week of Feb. 9th) to decide whether to:
a) proceed with the negotiations for the MAI or
b) to scrap the agreement altogether. Groups around the world are gearing up to increase the pressure nationally and internationally that the MAI should be stopped.
Below is a joint NGO (Non-Government Organisation) statement that was released in Paris during the NGO consultation meeting with the OECD last October. We are asking groups to endorse this statement so that we can re-release it internationally with more signatures the week of Feb. 9th.
Subject: Re Factual comments re Australians of the year
Keep the pressure on Hon.Member, it is good to see you have the guts to say what you can see is happening. I believe this was specifically done in an effort to bring down ONE NATION>... You have my support..
Clifton Broderick...
Subject: Comments on Australian News of the Day
Hi guys I'm Back
We just spent a couple of days up with the rellies on their farm just outside Warwick. Helping out around the place sure helps to shake out the cobwebs working around country people.
So here is a bit longer
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
Night after night, we sit for long hours in dark rooms. Identical images flow into our brains, homogenising our perspectives, knowledge, tastes, desires. We spend more hours watching nature shows than experiencing the real thing; more time laughing at TV jokes than making jokes ourselves; more time experiencing TV sex than actually touching another human body. If we forego the role of participant in the real world, we become spectators in the flickering world of make-believe. Twenty years ago the environmental movement shocked the world into realising that our natural environment was dying. Now, our mental environment is similarly endangered: Micro-jolts of mind pollution flood into our brains at the rate of 3,000 marketing messages per day -- twelve billion display ads, three million radio ads and over 300,000 TV commercials are dumped into our collective unconscious like toxic sludge. Our attention spans are diminishing, our imaginations giving out, we are unable to remember the past, unable to create a future......................
Throw out your TV Get a life!
Independent Candidate for the Federal Seat of Blair?
mm!
Barry A Sampson Searle
PS Regards the Ms Hanson's Oxley Poster, I don't spose that the ol' O.N. Spin doktors would be trying to manipulate the press yet again would they? C'mon Scott were not all that brain dead! ha! ha! Good joke but!
It's a long story... what I can tell you that One Nation has developed a "Plan "B"" for newspapers that try to get too smart. The news headline on Wednesday in the Queensland Times that Pauline Hanson would run for Blair was gained from unauthorised sources... and really p****d off the executive.
The poster shown yesterday was one of three prepared as poster proofs prior to Pauline's decision. Rumour has it that there is another version of that poster with the word "Blair" at the bottom.... That version has not fallen off the back of the truck as yet.
When Pauline is ready she will tell the press of her "actual" decision in the meantime what you might read, like this diatribe above, is pure speculation.
Another beautiful day in paradise.
Good rains overnight... have a good one.
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