Wednesday, 2 September 2015, deserves a special status in Australia’s calendar as the day when things started to unravel: growth in the second quarter fell to 0.2 per cent, the Aussie $ dropped under 70 cents to a six-year low and is heading towards 50 cents, the share market crashed to a new post-GFC low and unemployment rose to 800,000, a 20-year high.
Let’s get this in some kind of perspective. Australia’s rate of growth (surely rate of inertia?) is now officially slower than that of Greece, the world’s economic basket case. Australia’s dire economic growth collapse occurred in April, May and June, which was well before the effects of the China downturn hit world share, commodity and monetary markets.
The Oz share market closed a week ago at 5288 points and this Thursday it closed at 5048. In monetary terms that’s several billions off the value of shares (and superannuation funds).
Should we start calling it “Black Wednesday”? Not, according to ever-jovial Treasurer Joe Hockey, who claimed electors should be basking in the satisfaction of knowing that the Oz economy is “on track”.
And not according to the conga line of sleep-walking economists led by Saul Eslake who declared that Australia will avoid a recession. That’s only because it will be a 1930s-style depression.
During the Global Financial Collapse (GFC) in 2008, China’s rulers played a leading role in supporting the US and European “recovery”, spending trillions of dollars buying US and European treasury bonds.
Seven years later it is China that is dragging the world economy into the furnace of a meltdown. The saviour of economic fortunes has become the destroyer.
All attempts to re-stimulate through “quantitative easing”, i.e. printing more paper money, have not worked and failed to provide the sustained stability and recovery that was promised.
Meanwhile, a poor Liberal result in the Canning by-election on September 19 will see Abbott throw Hockey overboard in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. And there’s another thing: he failed to tell Abbott he was forming a backbench committee to lobby for a republic. Bye bye Joe.

Mass migration

The flight of capital from world “hot spots” has reached a furious pace. It is only rivalled by the furious pace of mass migration which is now occurring on a global scale.
Waves of migration are centuries old. They are part of the story of civilisation. In the past people moved to search for work, food, shelter and a new life. They were fleeing famine and flooding.
They provided labour for feudalism when kings, lords and knights ruled and later they entered the labour pool for the expansion of capitalism.
In 2015, the migrants are escaping the barbarities of imperialism in the Horn of Africa, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They are searching for the same things – work, food, shelter and a new life – but Europe can’t provide them because most EU states are broke.
The new arrivals have no intention of retracing their steps and going home. Unless they are forcibly rounded up and deported – as Donald Trump is proposing for 11 million Mexican “illegals” in the US – they are now a permanent part of the new demography of Europe.
Will the influx of Africans and Arabs be happy to submit to bank-driven austerity and sign up for the European super-state as planned by big industrialists and agriculture monopolies?
Somehow I doubt it. A new social and political dynamic has arrived in the heart of Europe and it will provide a massive impetus for change – for the better.

Remembering Budapest

The last time that Budapest central station saw such wretched human misery was in May 1944. At that time the platforms were packed with thousands of Hungarian Jews who were told they were being transported to Germany to work in factories.
In fact, they were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where 800,000 of them perished. The mass murder was under the command of Adolf Eichmann and facilitated by pro-Hitler Hungarian leader Admiral Miklos Horthy.
You’d think that the frightful scenes on television would soften the hearts of the most hardened Zionists and that money would be raised to support the refugees streaming into central Europe. Don’t hold your breath: the Lowy Institute isn’t planning a charity event.

“Barmy” Julie Bishop

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, former chair of the asbestos-loving law firm Clayton Utz, has come up with the bright idea of recruiting more Western states to bomb Iraq and Syria.
She ignorantly argues that it will stop the exodus of millions of Iraqis and Syrians by creating a safe place for them to live.
However, when local people hear constant reports of American “smart bombs” and drones destroying buildings, infrastructure and whole communities, they pack up and leave. Unless they are prepared to submit to the hoodlums of ISIS, they do the same thing when the Islamic militias roll up.
She doesn’t seem to have grasped the fact that bombing raids by the US, Australia and other nations are the major cause of the mass exodus.
We are being led by dangerous fools.

Migration solution?

Europe’s fascists, racists and xenophobes are pleading for a “solution” to the mass arrival of asylum seekers, and I have a possible answer.
Why not send an Australian Border Protection task force led by Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Phillip Ruddock and Andrew Bolt?
They would be welcomed by the likes of Golden Dawn (Greece), Jobbik (Hungary) and Bulgaria’s Nationalist Party.
I hope they give it some thought ….

Israel builds a ghetto

A Manchester-based software designer Damian Moran is the inspiration behind a UK public petition demanding the arrest of Israeli prime minster Benyamin Netanyahu on war crimes charges during his official visit to London this month.
The petition has received 93,085 signatures and will top 100,000, thus assuring a debate on the issue in the House of Commons.
But David Cameron’s Tory government which invited the war criminal to London has already furnished him with an immunity from criminal prosecution. (It is a long-established British tradition to grant legal amnesty to visiting butchers, despots and dictators).
Moran explained that he launched the petition because, “I have had enough.”
He cited the killing of 2,160 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 11,000 seriously injured, during the horrific bombing of Gaza in 2014.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has chosen one of his Likud hooligans, Danny Danon, as Israel’s ambassador to the UN in New York, an appointment described by Israeli commentators as “a cruel joke”.
Sacked by Netanyahu in 2014 as deputy defence minister, Danon is a Zionist fanatic who opposes any peace agreement with the Palestinians and calls for the permanent Israeli annexation of the West Bank and other parts of the Palestinian homeland.
His appointment at the UN demonstrates that the Israeli regime now officially regards the world body as the “global mouthpiece of anti-Semitism” and has a useful role to play in the Zionist state’s future. In this belief, Israel is walking the same path as South Africa’s apartheid leaders in the 1970s and 1980s.