post olympics carnage

The Olympics has provided a timely and convenient smokescreen for Australia and the US with their respective economy in tatters. Australia is particularly likely to feel the pain the hardest after the Olympic hoopla, bread a circuses have ended.

We are in a recession and thats if one takes a segemented and an intelligent look at the figures, the statistics and the economic data securely hidden in the general data published for the past 4 quarters.

If one takes out mining and resources, we have a huge black hole which governments under Costello and Howard in the first instance concealed in a deception like no other since world war 2. It is also something they foresaw which led them to keep us at war with Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of a self fulfilling prophesy generated by the Nazi's of the Chicago school of economics. Poor old Milton Freidman god rest his soul, and its not he that I refer to here.

Howard in particular is a shameless groupie of that school of economics, so anti Keynesian that their only mantra is a war cry everytime they are unable to reach a balance with human needs, wants and their own personal desire to maintain power at all costs driven by religious zeal and racial politics. Remember "we are going to create an Anglosphere here?" (JW Howard 2005).

We have no manufacturing, lowering interest rates only drives up inflation. Most of our primary producers will only be able to defer the inevitable like they have for the Howard decade. In any event, two of the major banks ran a brokerage of sorts encouraging farmers to sell their properties to 'silent' partners from Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia and India. Its a phenomenon that never made the headlines because farmers in distress preferred a partner than a bank with the power to call in their loans at will and to sell their security without mercy.

The oil shock of late was brought about by our participation in that ugly invasion of Irak. That leaves 6,000,000 barrells of oil per day out of the market. Our slavish and thoughtless support of the US regime against Chavez has taken another 2 million barrells a day and placed it into the spot market driven up by US operators anyway. Iran is another example of foreign policy failures that have impacted negatively on our economies.

Now we will blame the market and tell everyone who will listen (and thats just us) why our economy is the envy of the rest of the world and how the communists and unions are trying to destroy it under labour.

Our banks are standing precariously supported by legal action against anyone who points out their failings, lies and disasterous policies and investments with our money whilst our government is busily trying to find another excuse like Howard to create a smokescreen to deflect the realities of the recession we are in.

Unemployment figures is being fudged again like Easlake did a few years ago by a newer breed of politiconomists parading as independent economists.

The unemployment queues just got longer, the large numbers of single mothers and mothers with more than one child from the mining boom have also joined the hand out queue because of the larger number of mouths to feed.This is our biggest industry and likely to become bigger.

Watch Costello tell the world how he created the mining boom. Health in Queensland is like health in Bangladesh. At least there they have enough doctors to see you and offere some p[sychological comforts. We don't even have that luxiry here. The ordinary bloke cannot get something as basic as the right to see a doctor in some states anymore.

Our national airline is a disaster waiting to happen. The threats of litigation again is their best bet against people speaking out against their failures. Pity they con't see it fit to use money maintaining their fleets than on expensive lawyers to fight those who criticise them.

Our telecommunicaitons have been sold to foreigners whom we cannot sue for over charging because that part of the service has been outsourced and they don't have jurisdicitonal control over those issues as a result.

In short whats happened over the past decade or so is that our rights as citizens have been privatised or to put it more crudely, they have been "rendered".

As for education, we offer the world the best degrees money can buy. If you thinks that a joke just check the Indian press and Malaysia's debate on education now. As for the Chinese they are smart enough to know not to criticise because even those Chinese who can't read or write in English adequately can enter Australian universities, get the choice degree of the day (depending on what DIMIA publishes as having the highest points for migration) enroll for it, get a PR, marry and bring the family over. They are productive. Today most of our goods are theirs by make and most retailing outlets have gone to their hands.