Recent stories exclusive to (how to) subscribe/rs of the Australian National News of the Day:
One
Nation state and federal candidates meet in Toowoomba 4th -5th
April
Hindmarsh
Island Bridge case thrown out by High Court 2nd April
The
Hindmarsh Island Bridge farce revealed 31st March
UN
agrees to make our fresh water a "global commodity".... beware farmers -
your fresh water dam WILL cost you! 28th March
Courier
Mail's national affairs reporter Peter Charlton attacks MAI concerns and
breaches ethics guidelines 28th March
The
US Government's global "Cablesplice" project, fact or fantasy? 26th
March
Pauline
Hanson endorses 12 state candidates. 22nd March
News
Limited bucket opposition to the MAI. 21st March
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Since
October 1995
Pauline Hanson's One Nation one year young today
Today is a historic day. One Nation will celebrate its first birthday at Pauline Hanson's farm near Ipswich this weekend.
I will be reporting from there - so please excuse the delays and odd times in which reports are placed.
To follow the events at the farm follow this link.
Happy Easter!
MAKING SURE THE RICH STAY RICH
While most of us enjoy the Easter weekend in the knowledge that we will have jobs to go back to we should pause for a moment to think on the wharfies and bank staff.
I, like many of you, dislike the way Coombs and his thugs have manipulated the docks over the years and, yes, there is a sense of deja vu that Prime Minister John Howard is trying to hang his head on.
This is not my point. Just a week ago National Australia Bank announced that 4,000 more jobs would be lost in the cause of "rationalisation" - ANZ Bank are to cut 1,700 for the same "reason". These foreign owned banks were once Australian icons of sovereignty and independence. Today they are mere chattels of the US based banking conglomerates. There were no strikes, there were no threats, there was no cause for "liberating" the workforce from the union. Yesterday I went into the ANZ to use my card and was told that that branch only dealt with "corporate" clients and that they could not serve me.
While all this is happening the politicians recently fought over whether Prime Minister John Howard should be censured for his involvement in a Liberal Party think tank.
This is the level of debate of our "representatives" who actually represent little more than their own greed and the demands on multinational lobbyists. No mention was made of the newly-unemployed banking staff in the hallowed halls. With the wharfies it became a staged vote-winner for the Coalition "who had successfully defeated the "evil one" the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA)" through the joint efforts of Government, the National Farmers Federation (NFF) and Patrick Stevedores.
The Australian Labor Party barely raised a whimper of protest - almost excusing their support for the Australian Council of Trade Unions who had to stand by the MUA.
The question has got to be why. The answer is quite simple. The answer is globalisation.
Just like the banks and the "done deal" the Financial Services Industry Agreement the Patrick Stevedores case has a hidden agenda.
In February we revealed that the Liberal Party had been a given Au$4.65 million "loan" to help fund the coming Federal election. Being a loan meant that the "donater" did not have to be revealed. A few weeks earlier we had revealed that Franklins, the Hong Kong based multinational, with large retail interests in Australia were behind the funding of the NFF and the union busting drive on our docks. I believe that there is a link.
Now, as I said before, the MUA represent the worst of our unions, but what can be worst than the prediction I will now make. Quite simply I believe that a new company, a front for Franklins, will "buy over" the de-unionised dock areas and, just like the banking industry, re-structure the workforce to minimise costs and maximise profits. Now that would be acceptable if the owner was Australian - but it won't be. The profits and, more importantly, the control of our docks will be in the hands of overseas owners.
The government are in on the deal - they are in on the drive for "globalisation" as are the ALP - thus the difficult position that they found themselves in with the MUA.
Below is an article which highlights the manner in which the very rich abuse the privilege of being able to do business with us. It is about the Tobin tax and it should disturb you... because it is true.
Paul Martin hoped the Tobin tax would help the poor. His officials were horrified.
By Linda McQuaig Special to The Star
Rodney Schmidt was about as low as one could be on the finance department totem pole and still have a Ph.D. in economics. After doing his doctorate in international finance at the University of Toronto, Schmidt had joined the department in Ottawa as an entry-level economist and, after two years, he had risen one notch to a slightly more senior but still low-level rank.
It wasn"t exactly a meteoric rise, but Schmidt could be said to be doing relatively well for someone his age (36) in the hard-pressed "90s. Married with two young children, he already owned a house in the pleasant, shady-treed neighbourhood of Holland Cross in western Ottawa. In many ways, he had all the characteristics of a young up-and-comer in the finance department: bright, articulate, anglo, white, male. There was only one characteristic that made him seem a little different than the others in the department - a tendency toward independent thinking.
Schmidt was pleased in the spring of "94 to get what promised to be a very interesting assignment. He was to investigate the feasibility of something called the Tobin tax. Schmidt knew vaguely about the Tobin tax; it was an idea that had been proposed by Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin as an ambitious method of taxing the vast sums of money swirling around the world each day in international currency transactions.
It was an idea that the international financial community hated and it therefore had little chance of ever being implemented. But it was an intriguing concept, nonetheless, because it appeared to offer enormous benefits for those outside the financial community; that is, for most of the world"s population.
What made Schmidt"s little research project particularly fascinating was the fact that, as he was to discover, it came about because Finance Minister Paul Martin himself had expressed an interest in the tax and the possibility of raising it at an upcoming Group of 7 meeting in Halifax. As he settled in to work, Schmidt knew there was only one problem: His superiors had made it clear that his task was to come up with reasons to convince the minister that the tax was not a good idea.
Despite the almost ceaseless efforts of deputy minister David Dodge and other senior officials, there remained a small part of Paul Martin"s brain that hadn"t been fully won over to the finance department"s rigid free-market orthodoxy. One indication of Martin"s slightly off-beat orientation was the interest he took in the Tobin tax.
In a way, the tax was right up Martin"s alley. The notion of such a grand, visionary scheme as taxing affluent speculators in order to feed Third World children, fund the cleanup of Chernobyl-style disasters or assist in Canadian deficit reduction appealed to Martin"s innovative, activist side. Perhaps it gave him the feeling of potency.
Cut off from doing anything constructive to strengthen social programs or create jobs in the country where he actually wielded considerable power, Martin could at least cheer himself up by dabbling in remote, impossible schemes to make the whole world a better place.
In fact, Martin was aware there was some high-level support for the tax in other countries.
Lloyd Bentsen, who was at the time secretary of the U.S. treasury, was supportive, as Martin discovered when he began raising the subject informally at the regular meetings of G-7 finance ministers. Furthermore, Lawrence Summers, deputy treasury secretary, had vigorously endorsed the idea of the Tobin tax in his academic writing before joining the Clinton administration.
There was also support from high levels within the French government. On the other hand, there was opposition from other countries - notably Britain, which at the time had a Conservative government.
Inside Canada, there was also some political support beyond Martin. Even Prime Minister Jean Chretien was initially interested in the tax, and an official of his office was assigned to prepare a memo on the subject.
But if there was some support - or at least willingness to examine the issue further - in political circles, there was a resolute resistance to the tax on the part of senior finance department officials in Ottawa. "I raised the issue at one of my first meetings of the G-7 finance ministers, and I think it led during the next three meetings to not letting me out of the sight of finance officials," Martin quipped in later comments to the North-South Institute"s board of directors. He went so far that day as to jest: "Almost anybody who has any sense of human understanding and compassion takes views that oppose the views of the department of finance!"
So Martin certainly wasn"t surprised when the department"s paper on the matter, written by Schmidt, supported the department"s case against the tax. Despite his own misgivings, Schmidt had concluded, as instructed, that the tax was not workable. A meeting of senior officials from the finance department and the Prime Minister"s Office had no trouble deciding the idea was not worth pursuing at the Halifax summit.
Yet, even as the idea of the Tobin tax was being quietly put to rest at the senior levels of the Canadian government, there was a development at the other end of the continent that provided the perfect illustration of why such a tax could help the world.
For Canadians lying on sun-drenched Mexican beaches during the 1994 Christmas holidays, the biggest worry had likely been whether they had applied enough sun screen to their pale Canadian skin, all too suddenly uncovered after months encased in sweaters and coats.
The most immediate effect of the sudden collapse of the peso was that Canadian dollars could buy a whole lot more than the day before. Canadian tourists thus had even more bargaining power in haggling with underfed Mexicans for beachside trinkets and colourful local blankets.
But for the Mexicans, it was a bleak picture; their struggling lives were about to become even more difficult. Mexicans were experiencing the wild roller-coaster ride of dealing with international financial markets in the 1990s.
Mexico had become a magnet for footloose capital. Under Harvard- trained political leaders, the country had opened up its markets to foreigners, reduced its deficit and raised interest rates relentlessly to reduce inflation. The reforms were very popular with foreign investors, who poured some $30 billion (U.S.) into Mexican financial markets in 1993 alone.
But the flood of money caused problems for Mexico, artificially inflating its currency and making its exports uncompetitive. Fearing a devaluation, investors started pulling their money out. The drain of funds quickly turned into a haemorrhage, sparking the peso crisis.
So, is Mexico just a cautionary tale from the trenches of the new global economy, showing us the awesome power wielded by international investors? Was the peso crisis just an inevitable casualty of the new realities, a revelation of the ultimate powerlessness of the nation-state? Or could a different set of rules have produced a different result?
After Schmidt had completed his paper, producing the negative results his superiors wanted, that should have been the end of the matter. The only problem was that he felt ashamed of himself. Unable to shake the feeling, Schmidt set to work on a second paper, and this time, he decided to write what he considered to be an accurate assessment of the Tobin tax.
Tobin had first proposed his tax back in 1972 because he wanted to ensure that governments had the tools they needed to create full employment. He recognised that it was difficult for nations to pursue full employment policies when investors could move large amounts of money effortlessly around the globe in search of big returns.
If interest rates were higher in Mexico, investors would borrow money at lower rates in New York and move the money into higher-rate Mexican bonds to turn a quick profit. It therefore became necessary for countries to maintain high interest rates in order to compete for mobile capital. But maintaining high interest rates was a sure way for a country to choke its domestic economy; it made full employment policies virtually impossible. All this rapid exchange of money across currencies also had the negative effect of destabilising national currencies, making it hard for countries to conduct international trade.
The essential idea behind the Tobin tax was to hinder this easy movement of capital across currencies, thereby giving governments more scope to manage their own economies. Tobin was not trying to stop capital from moving, but simply to slow it down, to hamper its mobility, in order to prevent it from wreaking havoc with national currencies and from wielding too much power over national governments.
To do this, Tobin advocated imposing a small tax whenever money was exchanged from one currency to another. This would have the effect of discouraging short-term, in-and-out investments - such as the ones that contributed to the Mexican crisis - while not really affecting more desirable long-term investments.
Like the perfect cancer drug, which leaves healthy tissue alone, the Tobin tax would not impinge on the healthy flow of capital involved in nations trading and investing in one another.
The tax also had the potential to collect vast amounts of money. Even if it were set as low as 0.2 per cent, the revenue potential was dramatic because of the sheer volume of money that is exchanged on world currency markets - some $1.2 trillion (U.S.) a day. Of course, the revenue collected wouldn't amount to 0.2 per cent of $1.2 trillion a day, because the tax would have the effect of discouraging a lot of the short-term, speculative-type transactions - which was exactly what it was supposed to do.
So, either way, the world community would benefit: It would collect a huge amount of tax, which could be put to good purpose, or it would collect a smaller amount of tax, but succeed in discouraging disruptive capital flows.
`By scooping a tiny percentage of the enormous sums traded daily on foreign exchanges, the Tobin tax could help reduce the volatility in world currencies and collect billions of dollars for good causes" It seemed hard not to like the Tobin tax. By scooping a tiny percentage of the enormous sums traded daily on foreign exchanges, the Tobin tax could help reduce the volatility in world currencies and collect billions of dollars for good causes. And these were just the side benefits! Then there was the main benefit: giving countries greater freedom to pursue full-employment policies. If only the Tobin tax could do something really useful, like cure the common cold, perhaps the finance department in Ottawa would give it some serious consideration.
Schmidt set all these issues out in his second paper and provided details of the nature of the vast new market in currency speculation. There were lots of complex, new financial instruments - spot trades, currency options, outright forward swaps - all variations in the game of betting on the changing value of currencies. While increasingly exotic, these instruments were also increasingly divorced from the real world of trade in goods and services.
As Schmidt noted, in two-thirds of all the outright forward and swap transactions, the money moved into another currency for fewer than seven days. In only 1 per cent did the money stay for as long as one year.
While the volatile exchange rates caused by all this rapid movement posed problems for national economies, it was the bread and butter of those playing the currency markets. Without constant fluctuations in the currency markets, Schmidt noted, there was little opportunity for profit.
This certainly seemed to suggest the interests of currency traders and the interests of ordinary citizens were operating at cross-purposes.
Schmidt also noted another interesting aspect of the foreign- exchange market: The dominant players were the private banks, which had huge pools of capital and access to information about currency values. Since much of the market involved moving large sums of money (typically in the tens of millions of dollars) for very short periods of time (often less than a day), banks were perfectly positioned to participate. Among swap transactions, which represented a major chunk of the foreign exchange market, 86 per cent of the transactions were actually between banks. In Canada, the private banks carried out some $30 billion (Cdn.) a day in currency trades. This was, in fact, a growing part of the banks" business.
As Schmidt put the research together, the political nature of the problem became obvious. While volatile currency markets were bad for the national economy, they were advantageous to key elements in the financial community, particularly the banks, which were not generally shy about making their views known to government.
After his re-examination of the issue, Schmidt concluded in his second paper that the Tobin tax was potentially feasible and desirable. He submitted this second paper to his supervisors, in the hopes it would land on Martin"s desk, as the first paper had. But the department considered this paper unsuitable, and it was not approved for distribution up the chain of command.
As he prepared for the Halifax summit, Martin was to be spared the confusion of knowing that the finance department expert who had been assigned to investigate the Tobin tax had concluded, after a more independent review, that the tax was indeed worthy of further investigation.
After Schmidt submitted his second paper, it became clear to him that his supervisors were not pleased with him. "In finance, everybody is very tightly controlled by their immediate superior," he said in an interview. "To advance, you have to be a kind of lackey to your superior."
Certainly, Schmidt could see that the finance department was not the place for someone anxious to open up new avenues of discussion on economic policies, particularly controversial ones. So he left the department in the fall of 1997. He has joined an international aid agency and been posted to Hanoi.
At least the department will no longer have to put up with bothersome arguments about the need for a tax to give democratic governments more control over international financial markets.
If the peso crisis failed to push Ottawa to consider new approaches for dealing with the power and fickleness of financial markets, the Chretien government was quick to co-operate with a request from Washington for a $1 billion line of credit as part of a $50 billion bailout package for Mexico. It seemed ironic, on the face of it, that the United States was hustling to hand over $50 billion to help out a country whose citizens were regularly rounded up by U.S. border patrols and treated little better than dogs.
Of course, the irony disappears when we remember that the $50 billion was not actually to help the Mexican people, but rather to make sure investors, mostly from the United States, Japan and Europe, didn't suffer huge losses on their Mexican holdings. Essentially, Western nations were spending their tax dollars - collected from all their citizens - to make sure their wealthiest and most powerful citizens did not suffer significant investment losses.
What is intriguing is how far all this strays from the notion that international capital markets are simply free markets operating on their own. The investors who stood to lose money in the peso crisis were not left to the mercy of a capricious market. On the contrary, a costly international rescue effort was orchestrated by the most powerful nations of the world, almost overnight, to insulate these investors from any potential harshness the market might deal out.
Indeed, contrary to popular lore, international financial markets are already subject to heavy intervention. But this intervention is carried out in the interests of financial investors. Why not carry it out instead in the public interest - as measures like the Tobin tax aim to do?
To even suggest that international financial markets be regulated in the public interest sounds, of course, like pie-in-the-sky dreaming. But in fact its been done before - for several decades following World War II. And those decades, interestingly, coincided with the most prosperous era in the history of the world.
Making the
news" -
Subject: Launch of One Nation in Tasmania
To the One Nation Party
Your doing a great job trying to get the country back on track again - and face the problems which other politicians have not. Good for you!
Keep up the good work
Peter
Subject: i support you
Hi
I support One Nation and think it is great what you are doing i recently went to a meeting of Pauline's in N.S.W in Penrith i was just wondering how many seats will One Nation proberly get in QLD
Justin Morris
Subject: Re: Pauline Hanson's One Nation April Newsletter
Hello again . . .
Tonight I went along to your first meeting for the Eden Monaro seat/branch (Queanbeyan). About 50 people showed up - which is promising - and early days yet as I am sure we all understand.
Keep up the good work . . .
RoyB
Subject: True Blue
May I take this opportunity to wish Australians well in their nationwide strike action, for freedom and democracy. Your tremendous fight against the illegal actions of Patrick Stevedoring Ltd laying off 1400 watersiders, is on every newsbroadcast in N.Z., both radio and T.V. We are open mouthed with delight and astonishment as we watch your teachers, nurses, drivers, labourers, public servants, - every union in your country, leave their place of work and rise up against the injustice of the Australian Government and their business pals, in their pathetic attempt to break one of the toughest unions in the world, and stamp their greedy, neo-conniving agenda, on the Australian people.
God be with you as we are.
Janice
MULTINATIONAL ANDERSEN CONSULTING:
Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Andersen Consulting, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes.
Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Andersen Consulting convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Anderson consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergise with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes.
The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values.
This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Andersen Consulting helped the chicken change to become more successful.
Another perfect day in paradise.
Have a good one.
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