There is a fury against this global banking fraud that is building every day. People from all kinds of backgrounds, all over the world, have had enough.
The policy of the banks has been to keep interest rates as low as possible, so as to fuel financial speculation, no matter how oppressive the effect of that would be. Low interest rates wipe out savers and devastate middle-class workers. The banksters have orchestrated this wealth transference of trillions, from the poor to the very wealthy. At the expense of everybody who isn't at the top.
I am pro-capitalism and I am pro-free market. But what you have now is not capitalism. It is a state- controlled, command and control, centralised politburo. Both in Britain and the United States and it was going that way under Labour in Australia. The States is run by the Federal Reserve, an institution that answers only to itself and to a few large banks. It's modelled on the Bank of England. Benjamin Franklin said that one of the main reasons America revolted was to get away from the Bank of England, the mother of all central banks; the most pernicious and insidious of all.
Democracy is not well served by the current political configuration in America. The entire political establishment is designed around enriching a minority of people who have access to both information and capital. It might improve under Abbott, we must just hope so
The Tea Party are a small group trying to rectify this situation

Dickybird

You exhibit clashing views that are typical of the tea party movement.

Your condemnation of "banksters" (Gnomes of Zurich?) forgets that banks provide the essential credit-loans for the capitalist, free market system that you sell.

Isn't the free market all about unfettered money transfers across borders?

Are you saying capitalism doesn't concentrate money in the hands of the rich?

Do you think the US Government could function without the Federal Reserve? Or can people do without central government?

--

David G

I can see what your getting at but views often have more impact if they can recognise the complexity of countries, economic systems and people's mixed-up behaviour. China is a case in point of a prudent compromise between capitalist and command economic values.

Being explicitly leftwing all the time wouldn't gain one knowledge of usually quiet matters from Yanks. Some are/were leftwing, centrist or rightwing neo-cons. Snowden's revelations were no surprise at all.

There are various ways to skin a cat.

--

SHRODE

I think Australia has an unusually stable and lucky financial system. Stable because their is a balance between free-market financial mechanisms (that Keating was part of) and strong banking regulatory requirements.

Australia is lucky because the China market is an option we can accentuate when Wall Street, the Fed and Congress fail (which happened in 2008 and almost now).

Regards

Pete

Pete says that "...views often have more impact if they can recognise the complexity of countries, economic systems and people's mixed-up behaviour."

I take the opposite view. Simplify things right down to their basics so that the man and woman in the street can absorb and perhaps grasp is my motto!

And it's also important to include passion when presenting alternative, controversial viewpoints. Skinning the cat with vigor and enthusiasm and emotion works for me.

Cheers!

Why is such a great republic, the first nation founded as a result of the Enlightenment and advancing humanity by unimaginable leaps and bounds, such a corrupt, arrogant empire held in such widespread resentment and contempt?

It makes sense when you remember it is TWO nations, which fought in a cataclysmic civil war between a growing democracy (flawed like any other settler state) and a huge bulk of the kind of vermin who saw fit to buy human beings as slaves, the two nations roughly separated as North and South. All that was decent was concentrated in the North and all that was vile was concentrated in the South.

The South rebelled rather than lose their power as Übermenschen to enslave human beings and the North made a terrible mistake: at the cost of the death of up to 400 thousand decent Americans it went to war to keep the cancer in the body politic.

At war's end they made the second terrible mistake: after defeating the Rebels at such cost they failed to stamp out the embers.

The embers went on smouldering and have finally come close to reigniting in an open attempt to reverse the defeat of the South and of everything rotten it stands for. That’s what the Tea Party and this demonstration of power to bring the Republic down is about. The threat will escalate until either America vomits up the poison or the poison engulfs it and all its satellites including Australia.

I would heartily recommend Chuck Thompson’s brilliant book “Better Off Without ‘Em: a Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.”[1] The cover presents it as a bit of a romp but it’s well-researched , it gives no quarter, and its logic points inexorably to a road that America will have to take to survive.

[1] http://chuckthompson.com/