Clik here to view.
The Global Financial System Controls Humanity to the Hilt
An article by Steve Madigan, entitled “The Australian Government is Controlled by the Banks.”
May 2002
http://www.newworldpeace.com/howthebanks.html
In Australia, very few people realise that we have the incredible situation where the international bankers govern Australia. The Australian Government is nothing more than the servant or agent of the bankers. As you know, the banks lend money to persons, small businesses and large corporations. But banks also lend money to State and Federal Governments to pay for their essential services such as defence, police, health, education, courts, social services, etc. All major banks are now international banks. The Big Four are: ANZ, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank. Don't be deceived by the Australian names, Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank; they are not Australian, they have been taken over by international shareholders with no loyalty toAustralia whatsoever. The Big Four, or the Gang of Four, as they are known, have an incestuous relationship with each other and co-operate among themselves.
The money to pay for these services is raised by taxing the people. But when the taxes are not enough to pay for these services the Government borrows the required amount from the banks and has to repay the loan, PLUS INTEREST. To pay the loan and interest the Government further taxes the people. The banks cannot lose because they have the taxes of the people as security for their loans. This adds to Australia's ever-increasing debt to the banks, which places the banks in a very powerful position of authority over the Government. As a result the banks control Government policies such as immigration, multiculturalism, aborigines, free trade and many others. The banks can simply say to the Government, “Do what we tell you or we won't lend you any more money.” (This situation is the same, whether in Australia, America or England.)
The government does not represent the people, they represent the international banks. Elections are only a farce, designed to fool the people into thinking they are electing their representatives in Parliament. When a business corporation borrows big money the bank gets a “say” in how the business should be run. This is to protect the banker's money invested in the business. But like a business, no Government can borrow big money unless willing to surrender a considerable amount of control to the banker. (See the best selling book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy [NDCC ], by G. Allen, page 38, Concord Press, USA)..
In the year 2001, Australia's foreign debt was $326.12 billion (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Balance of Payments; Cat. No. 5302.0; Table 35). It is even more now. The Treasury Department advises that Australian taxpayers pay $20 billion interest on this debt every 12 months. Imagine the schools, hospitals, police, soldiers and equipment $20 billion would buy every 12 months! You can control a Government if you have it in your debt. A creditor (banker) is in a position to demand the privileges of monopoly. Money-seeking Governments have granted monopolies … the monopoly which the international financiers most covet is control over a nation's money. ( NDCC [above], page 41)
Whoever controls credit, controls policy, and with it, power over and above the heads of Government. ( The ABC of Social Credit , page 25, by E.S. Holter; Heritage Bookshops). Richard McKenna, former president of the Midlands Bank of England said, “Those that create and issue the money and credit, direct the policies of Government and hold in their hands the destiny of the people” ( NDCC , page 41). Once a Government is in debt to the bankers it is at their mercy. A frightening example of this was cited by the London Financial Times in 1921, which revealed that … “Half a dozen men at the top of The Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of Government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills.” ( NDCC , page 41).
Prominent writer, the late B.A. Santamaria, writing in The News Weekly, 31 st May 1997, said “Overseas forces, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the rest (the international bankers – Editor ) have simply said to our Government, ‘You are bankrupt, but we are prepared to carry you, at least for the time being, but only so long as you do what you are told. You must preserve the value of the money we've lent you by eliminating inflation, balancing budgets, selling off public utilities (assets), cutting wages and social services and maintaining a pool of unemployed to guarantee the policy. It's up to you.” Do you see the importance of that statement? The bankers are saying to the Australian Government: “DO WHAT WE TELL YOU OR WE WON'T LEND YOU ANY MORE MONEY.”
The IMF is like the debt collector for The Gang of Four (international bankers) and the rest. A country in debt is no longer in charge of its economic affairs. The private international bankers to whom it owes money demand the right to ‘advise' economic policy and that appears to have been the case in Australia since at least 1983. Since economic management represents such a large part of a Government's responsibilities, the relinquishment of it marks the beginning of the end of political sovereignty as well. ( Economic Rationalism - Disaster for Australia, by G. Strachan; page 5, Kalgoorlie Press, 72 Hare Street, Kalgoorlie, W.A., 6430). They “advise” economic policy. In other words, the banks tell the Government what policies to introduce.
Writer and lecturer, Jeremy Lee, reports:
An ominous example of the pressure on this issue before which politicians wilt was illustrated in June 1996 – shortly after John Howard became Prime Minister when 100 international financiers gathered in Sydney to lay out their terms for foreign investment and lending.Financial economist and journalist Peter Harcher described what took place:“As John Howard swept into the chandeliered banquet hall to address top executives of the world's biggest banks this week, he could hardly have known that a trap had been laid for him.” “The bankers, the most internationally influential audience Mr Howard has confronted since taking office, had spent half a day discussing the price they would demand from countries round the world for bankrolling them.
“In an increasingly capital-thirsty world, international financiers, the commissars of capital, have become modern potentates (A potentate is someone who possesses great power – Editor) with the power to dictate policy to states (i.e. governments) which have long considered themselves sovereign. By the time Mr Howard took the lectern in Sydney, the speakers at the ‘invitation only' International Monetary Fund (IMF) Conference had already set out a check list of policies.” “Most explicit was the chairman of the big US Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs & Co., Mr John Corzone, a former central banker, who was asked by the group to specify conditions for what he called the ‘inherently blunt process that leaves many worthy initiatives and investments without resources …'” “John Corzone, from Goldman Sachs, laid out on behalf of those present the conditions they required for bankrolling Australia. Apart from continued privatisation, tax reform, removal of protection of (Australian) industries (tariffs), reduction in public payrolls and pension reform, the bankers required an assurance that Australia would not follow in an ‘independent' line with regard to financial policy. Mr Howard was compliant.”
Peter Harcher continued: “… Although Mr Howard did not spell out his full agenda, his Government is indeed moving on virtually all of the specifics nominated by Mr Corzone … He was, in short, pronounced credit-worthy in the great global competition for capital ...” So certain is The ‘Gang of Four' (as the four major Australian Trading Banks are now widely known) that Government is compliant to its whims and will not challenge its monopoly in the ‘money printing' business, that its members have moved effortlessly into total domination in corporate Australia ( Australia 2000 – How Bright the Vision , by J. Lee; Pickford Productions).
For many years, Australia has gone deeper and deeper in debt to the international bankers. In 1982 our foreign debt was $23 billion. In 1993 it was $145 billion. ( Economic Rationalism , by G. Strachan [above]). In 2001 our debt was $326.12 billion. $326 billion! And this is after selling off most of our public assets to ‘reduce' our debt! Imagine what it would have been if we had not sold our assets? Columnist, Kenneth Davidson, writing in The Age, 29th June 1998, said, “It comes to this: Only (Pauline) Hanson defends the nation-state. One Nation is the creature of the suffocating bi-partisanship of the two major political parties, who agree on the need to globalise the Australian economy on the terms laid down by the international capital markets.” Money power is the greatest power … in the whole world. It is the power to give and the power to take away, the power to destroy and the power to create, the power to crush opposition or bestow favours. ( The Money Trick , by the Institute of Democracy). In England, Sir Drummond Fraser, Vice President of The Institute of Bankers, stated, “The Governor of the Bank of England … dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money.” ( The Money Power versus Democracy , by E. Butler; Heritage Bookshops.)
So, you can see the power and control the international bankers have over our Government and how our vote is meaningless, because it matters not which party is in (so called) Government. The international bankers have no loyalty to Australia or the Australian people. They are international and have only two loyalties: profit and power. World-wide ‘free-trade' (economic rationalism) benefits the international bankers because, instead of Australia producing our own goods atrelatively high wages, we now import our goods from countries where wages are only a fraction of our wages. The bankers and the multinational corporations they control (through loans to them) can exploit the cheap wages for huge profits. But the result for Australia is massive unemployment. High immigration also benefits the bankers because people come into Australia and will work for much less wages than Australians. The international bankers ordered our politicians to bring in the GST. ‘Our' politicians saluted and said, “Yes Sir.” They also ordered our Government to sell off our assets to foreign corporations. Assets such as: power, water, transport, sewerage, etc. which were owned and paid for by the taxes over many years of the Australian people. This is called privatization. The reason given for privatization was that by selling off Australia it would reduce our foreign debt.
The international bankers are getting a vice-like grip on Australia. But privatisation is illegal because there is no provision for it in the Australian Constitution, which sets out what the Government can do and can‘t do. Such is the power of the bankers that they can force our Government to do illegal acts. The bankers also instruct our Government to adopt many other policies which are destroying Australia and making us even weaker prey to these international money merchants. To conclude, the international bankers control our Government by getting it into debt. A further benefit to the bankers is that the higher the debt, the more interest (money) they receive.
With the collaboration of corrupt, traitorous politicians, the international bankers have got Australia into massive debt. This has been done in a number of ways: For many years our Governments have given billions of taxpayers' dollars to corrupt, brutal foreign regimes like China, Indonesia and others. They call this ‘foreign aid.' They adopted a policy of ‘free trade' (economic rationalism – although there's nothing rational about it at all). By removing our tariffs they allowed Australia to be swamped by imports from countries where wages are very low. Our industries and farms went out of business because they could not compete. We now have to import many of our goods.
In 1953 the Government brought in the Double Taxation Act, which allowed foreign multinational corporations operating in Australia to pay little or no tax (as the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation admitted). Australian companies had to pay their tax and they could not compete with the foreigners who took them over or forced them out of business. $400 billion profits flies out of Australia every 12 months. ( Austand's Newsletter , “Oznews”, August 2000; P.O. Box 173, Noosa Heads, Qld 4567). The politicians also throw our money away on things like ATSIC (Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission) which does not even benefit the average Aborigine. The direct and indirect costs of immigration and multiculturalism are huge. There is much more, but by now you probably get the picture. In these ways the bankers have weakened us, devastated our economy and got us into debt and under their control. As stated, in 1982 our foreign debt was $23 billion. It is now at least $326 billion, even after selling off (privatising) most of our assets, paid for by Australian taxpayers.
B.A. Santamaria again, “Powerful individuals and forces are making enormous fortunes out of the ruin of Australia.” ( Dictatorship of the Foreign Controlled Media , by J. Graham, page 17; Heritage). The politicians are governed by the international bankers. That means, you are governed by international bankers. In case you are wondering why the mainstream media doesn't reveal this breathtaking treason by our politicians, the mainstream media is also owned and controlled by the international bankers. Read the book Dictatorship of the Foreign Controlled Media ” (Heritage Bookshops).
The following quotations give us considerable insight:
- “Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.” (Former British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli).
- “The world is governed by very different people from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” (Benjamin Disraeli).
- “The international bankers swept statesmen, politicians, journalists and jurists all to one side and issued their orders with the imperiousness of absolute monarchs.” (Former British Prime Minister, Lloyd George).
- Imperious means to rule over in a severe, domineering manner; over-bearing; dictatorial; tyrannical; commanding. (Macquarie Dictionary).
- Give me the right to issue and control a nation's money and I care not who governs the country.” (International Banker, Meyer Amschal Rothschild).
Mr Rothschild was not only above the law, he was the law! We are now seeing the chaos and terrible suffering of the people in Argentina, with the banks, politicians and economy out of control. This is what is going to happen to Australia, perhaps much worse, if we don't control the bankers and politicians.
THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE ARE ‘GOVERNED' BY INTERNATIONAL BANKERS
That is why the world's richest nation ( World Bank survey, The Australian Newspaper, 20th September 1995) is in this terrible mess. There is a solution but it is beyond the scope of this small publication. But what you can do at present is to tell your family, friends and associates about this dangerous situation. Make copies of this report and circulate them far and wide. Use your initiative to get this information to as many people as possible. Ask people, in turn, to hand this report on and on. The reason we have fallen into this dangerous situation is because this knowledge has been kept secret from the people. “Picture yourself as a person with enough money to make interest-bearing loans and becoming a banker. The more loans you make, the more profits you make, and the bigger the borrower, the bigger the profits! Along with other bankers, you have your hands on the ‘wealth of the world' literally! Ah, so wouldn't it be cool if you could get governments to borrow your money while you control it? In the U.S., you could call yourself the official-sounding ‘Federal Reserve (central) Banking System' and make huge profits on money you loan to the government, while your true allegiance, of course, remains with your private profits and bank investors!
With no labor and no sweat, you now expand your money-making machinery by joining foreign ‘central' bankers loaning money to all types of governments, revolutionaries, terrorists, mercenaries, secret agencies and other entities, large and small - everywhere - who keep profits flowing for not only yourself but for other beneficiaries who get caught up in ‘profit-fever', like the military-industrial complex. All kinds of wars, cold or hot, and threats of wars, do very nicely in generating more and bigger loans for more and bigger profits! You can call one of them the ‘War on Terrorism'. Just don't forget to display a flag and act patriotic! Hey, why not set-off the really Big One - Armageddon? Along with other bankers, you can loan money to all sides for the ‘mother of all human-caused catastrophes' and watch the warring commoners kill each other in the east, west, north and south - paying heavy taxes to their governments to pay for your loans - while you finalize control of the entire planet for the money lenders and controllers! Nasty but ‘neat', eh?” Had enough?
Inside John Howard’s legacy
5 March 2016
Mike Seccombe
Twenty years after he won government, the economic and political damage of John Howard’s leadership is becoming clearer.
They say old politicians are like old actors. They revive under the spotlight. Exhibit A, John Howard. The coming week will mark the 20th anniversary of his election as prime minister, and suddenly he is everywhere. He’s been offering views ranging from the ridiculous – suggesting that his protégé Tony Abbott, had he not been rolled from the prime ministership, could have won the next election; to the subversive – backing Abbott and the other government backbenchers opposed to any meaningful reform of negative gearing; to the electorally suicidal – advocating an increase in the goods and services tax, to fund personal and company tax cuts. Needless to say, this has not been helpful for the current prime minister and putative leader of the government, Malcolm Turnbull. He wisely let the comments about Abbott’s potential for electoral victory go through to the keeper. As for Howard’s views on tax, Turnbull said last Sunday that he had engaged in “a long chat with John about negative gearing and other aspects of tax only yesterday. He’s obviously a great source of advice.” It must be galling to have to be so polite. First because Howard’s comments appear to have given succour to Abbott in his efforts to subvert the leadership, and second because the problems Turnbull is now struggling to fix were largely created by the Howard government. Malcolm Turnbull would not say that, of course. He would say, as he did at the 20th-anniversary celebratory dinner this week, that Howard was the “gold standard” of prime ministership. To say otherwise would amount to apostasy. “More than any other prime minister he capitalised on fear for political advantage.”
But when you talk to public policy experts, the picture that emerges is one of a rather inert government that had a very thin record of reform, that left Australia more divided, that entrenched privilege and inequality, and that left the political and economic landscape littered with mines primed to blow up under successor governments. The Howard government came to power with the election slogan “For All of Us” and its actions over the subsequent 11-and-a-half years suggest the word “us” was tightly defined. Observers paint the picture of a government that was not particularly good, but extraordinarily lucky. “They had three things going for them,” says Jeff Borland, professor of economics and labour market expert at the University of Melbourne. “First, the continuing benefit of the economic reforms of the Hawke–Keating years. Second was a Reserve Bank which by the ’90s had a clear understanding of the workings of the economy and had, in Ian Macfarlane, an outstanding governor. Third, they had favourable economic conditions.” Aside from introducing the GST, Borland says, they did little in the way of positive reform. “Lots of [economists] bookend economic reform with the floating of the currency in 1983 and the GST in 2000,” says Borland. “They didn’t mess up. By which I mean they didn’t ever run a really loose budget that caused things to end up worse at that time.” But he stresses the phrase “at that time”. “They didn’t set the economy up for the future and some of the policies they introduced have … been ticking time bombs. They squandered the opportunity the economic good times provided for further reform, and we’re paying for that now.”
1. Economic inequity
Certainly the headline numbers look good. Through the Howard years economic growth was strong and people’s incomes rose at a healthy pace. Official statistics show that between the time Howard came to power in March 1996 and the time he lost office in December 2007, per person household incomes grew by about 25 per cent in real terms. But when you dig a little deeper, things look less rosy, for the rising economic tide did not lift all boats by the same amount. Economic inequality grew through that period, as did relative income poverty, says Professor Peter Whiteford of the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy. Household income for the top 10 per cent went up 60 per cent. “It was the highest for any OECD country for the period,” says Whiteford. For the median household, it went up about 53 per cent. For the poorest 10 per cent, it went up about 37 per cent. So the story is that everyone did better, but the rich did much better.
It was the economic boom that drove incomes higher, but it was primarily the government’s approach to tax and welfare policy that caused the inequality. “In general terms, most of the big economic changes made by the Howard government could be described as tribal. Looking after their tribe,” says another senior economist, who specialises in the welfare area, and who asked not to be named because he advises government. “The work-for-the-dole scheme was symbolic of the Howard view of unemployment being an incentive problem. They committed to a scheme that made little difference to people’s job prospects.” He ticks off a couple of other Howard-era initiatives that served to increase inequality. “The introduction of the Job Network saw the stripping out of about $1 billion of assistance for people unemployed long term. “There was the welfare-to-work policy that shifted single parents and people with disability off to the lower Newstart allowance. “They redirected money away from those on working-age benefits towards older people generally, and particularly the upper middle class.”
One of Howard’s personal obsessions, the economist says, was the idea of income splitting, whereby couples with one high-income working partner and one non-working partner – like his household – could divide the income between them and so pay less income tax. “He could not get income splitting through the tax system, so he got at it through the welfare system,” the economist says referring to the government’s family benefits scheme. That’s perhaps a bit tough. The welfare changes of the Howard years, particularly the family tax benefits initiatives, says Roger Wilkins, research fellow at the Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne, were “surprisingly redistributive”. “They had an impact particularly in reducing child poverty, even though they weren’t very well targeted,” he says. Which is another way of saying they equated to middle-class welfare. “One of the unsung successes of the Rudd–Gillard government,” says John Daley, CEO of the centrist think tank the Grattan Institute, “was that they whittled it back so that today the Family Tax Benefit is now a very well-targeted policy, going where it should to the bottom half of the income scale.” In any case, what the government did in welfare is very small beer compared with what it did on taxes. With vast amounts of money coming into government coffers thanks to the mining boom and asset sales, the Howard government had the chance to put money aside to help the country through the inevitable downturn. That is not what happened. Instead, we saw round after round of income tax cuts. To be fair, it should be noted the last of them was delivered by the incoming Rudd Labor government, although it was only honouring a commitment to match what Howard had promised. The benefits flowed overwhelmingly to the upper end of the income scale. By the calculation of The Australia Institute, 42 per cent went to the top 10 per cent of income earners. The most affluent 20 per cent of income earners got more than the bottom 80 per cent. Without these income tax cuts, there would be no budget crisis now. As Daley says: “That’s where the underlying budget deficit started.”
2. Super and negative gearing
And there’s more. Take superannuation, the benefits of which are skewed in favour of the wealthy. Because contributions are taxed at a flat rate of 15 per cent, the tax benefit of putting money into super are greater for those in higher tax brackets. They became even more skewed after the Howard government decided to stop taxing the income earned on retirement incomes. “This meant that people with very large amounts of money in superannuation just stopped paying tax,” says Daley. “Coupled with a couple of one-off things that allowed people to put big sums into their superannuation, some people literally borrowed millions to put into super. It amounted to an enormous, one-off tax holiday for a bunch of mostly rich old men.”
And then onto negative gearing. As Howard rightly said in at least one of his many media appearances in recent days, negative gearing – which allows investors to write off the costs of an investment against other income – had been around “forever”. What he did not say was that until the 1999–2000 financial year, it was not a particularly popular tax dodge. Then his government changed the rules for taxing capital gains, which turbocharged negative gearing. As Roger Wilkins explains: “There was previously a quite enlightened policy whereby capital gains were adjusted for inflation and then after adjustment, taxed at the marginal rate of income. For reasons for which there was no good explanation, they decided to go with a 50 per cent [tax] discount on all capital gains after an asset was held for 12 months or more.” In combination, negative gearing and the capital gains discount encouraged investors to make a loss on their rental property and to focus not on rental returns but on capital gains. The effect was to drive up house prices and lower rates of home ownership as would-be owner-occupiers were outbid by speculative investors. Again, despite the claims that “mum-and-dad” investors benefit, the data shows the money flows overwhelmingly to high-income earners. The cost to the budget is about $7 billion a year.
3. Healthcare and education
The inequities fostered by the Howard government go beyond tax and welfare issues, too. Take healthcare. When Howard was elected prime minister in 1996, private health insurance membership rates had fallen to a low of 34 per cent, for the simple reason that it was not good value. On the pretext of easing the burden on the public hospital system, the government sought to drive more people back into private health cover. They tried multiple unsuccessful policies, and in 1999 introduced a 30 per cent subsidy for private health insurance, for which all Australians were eligible, regardless of income. Says one of the country’s leading health economists: “The private health insurers did very well out of it, private hospitals did very well out of it. But it did nothing to take the burden off public hospitals.” In fact a 2005 study by health economist Stephen Duckett, former secretary of the federal Department of Health, found it simply increased the overall number of hospital visits, and that increasing activity in the private sector led to increases in waiting times in public hospitals. To the extent that it benefited consumers at all, it benefited higher-income consumers. Poor people cannot afford private insurance, with or without a rebate. “It was certainly not an equity measure,” says one expert. “If you were interested in equity you’d invest in public hospitals.” By 2014, the cost to the budget was $6 billion. A study by the Grattan Institute determined abandoning it would save $3 billion, even accounting for the increased cost to public hospitals. The current government is looking at doing just that.
Then take education. The new Howard government changed the basis on which federal funding was allocated to private schools. The bottom line for the new funding model, says Chris Ryan, director of the economics of education program at the Melbourne Institute, was “lots of well-known and very rich getting millions more in funding”. The change also increased the speed of the drift of students to private schools, which in turn has had an impact on public schools “because there has been a process of residualisation”, Ryan says. “More and more the hardest-to-educate kids have been left to the public system.” Not only has this led to an increasing gap between the best and worst performing schools, it appears to have made Australia, for want of a better term, dumber overall. The Program for International Student Assessment survey, which compares the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in more than 70 countries, shows Australia’s results have been in decline since 2000.
4. Social division
In general terms, says social researcher Hugh Mackay, the Howard years were marked by the fostering of social division. “More than any other prime minister he capitalised on fear for political advantage,” he says. Howard, he says, exploited groups such as refugees for political advantage. Howard was the man who refused to apologise to the Indigenous Stolen Generations. His was the government that changed the Marriage Act to stipulate that it had to be between a man and a woman. He was the one who fostered the intolerant religious right within politics. He drove out moderate forces. “He left us a meaner society than we were, much less committed to egalitarianism and to our moral obligations,” says Mackay. Twenty years on, if the changes, social and economic, that John Howard wrought on Australia were to be summed up in two words, they would be “less fair”. And Malcolm Turnbull must surely recognise this. When he took over the leadership of the government from Howard’s acolyte, Tony Abbott, he was at great pains to stress his fundamental goal for a fair society. But, as the past week has shown, even 20 years on, it’s still John Howard’s Liberal Party.