A reader has pointed me at an excellent story on just how rotten and corrupt the current bailouts of America’s finance sector are, and how they essentially represent a coup d’etat:
“As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.”
If you thought AIG was just an insurance group fallen on hard times you really need to read this article and think again.
1) Defence has run a security once over across their Minister Joel Fitzgibbon. I’d be more alarmed if they hadn’t.
2) It turns out that Fitzgibbon has had a relationship of some sort with a well connected Chinese woman. This might be of some concern or might be completely innocent.
3) Someone inside Defence has leaked this information.
Point two is a little bit interesting. Even without realising it, or having done anything wrong, there’s a chance Fitzgibbon has been groomed by the Chinese here. As a smart young operator in the ALP he certainly would have been a prospect 16 years ago. On the other hand these revelations pretty much remove blackmail potential.
Point three is where it gets explosive. The Defence bureaucracy is despised by pretty much every sector which intersects it. The uniformed ADF and the Government are now in conflict with them. They needed their minister on their side.
Even if they do manage to get Fitzgibbon moved on can you imagine how a new minister is going to view the Department.
Someone very, very thick was behind this leak. It’s a worry that they had access to it.
The Herald Sun has some explanation of the high drama and farce surrounding today’s defeat of the alcopop tax rise.
There are a few interesting things here deserving further exploration:
1) According to Laurie Oakes, Nigel Scullion missed the first vote because he was having a “stairwell meeting” with the retired Senator Natasha Stott Despoja.
2) The confusion here comes from a criminally lazy form of law-making perfected by the Liberals but carried on by the ALP. This is where tax changes are announced via a media release and are immediately effective, with enabling legislation to follow. It’s a disgusting bastardisation of democratic norms and its defeat in any form or manner is a good thing.
3) The ALP is going to have to stop holding Senator Steve Fielding in contempt. I disagree with Senator Fielding on pretty much everything. But every Senator should be treated with respect.
4) There was never any health upside here. Kids will still try and get drunk and free-pouring their own mixers is vastly more dangerous than the spew-before-you’re-poisoned alcohol concentrations of the alcopops.
5) The biggest bunch of binge drinkers you’ll meet are making these laws. But they can afford the extra excise. The rank hypocrisy of all commentators here other than the Salvation Army stinks to high heaven.
A lot of people, much smarter than I, are concerned that the Government responses to the current financial crisis won’t work the way their salesmen are promising.
The concern goes on that by printing more money to solve the short term budgetary problems of Governments could lead to run away inflation, even hyper-inflation.
This basically is what happened in Germany in their response to the great depression. The solution in the end was to invade all their neighbours to steal their gold reserves. (Make no mistake, the Nazi’s were flat strap broke. Kicking off global conflict was easier than dealing with the economic problems they faced).
But when faced with an asset bubble too painful to deflate suddenly hyper-inflation has some up sides.
Basically the rest of the economy bubbles up to the point that the inflated assets resume their usual proportions but no-one has to take a paper loss.
Sure, the comparative de-valuation of your house won’t be much fun from an investment point of view. But when the same wheel-barrow full of cash you were going to use to buy a loaf of bread can also pay off your entire mortgage things aren’t entirely bad. You’ve still got somewhere to live and you’re mortgage free.
All too often Government’s don’t explain the real reasons for their actions. The 2007 changes to superannuation were a bi-partisan de facto raising of the retirement age, but did anyone mention that to the public at the time?
Other than a period of hyper-inflation is there any way out of the current crisis? I can’t see it.
Will the current government actions around the world create that hyper-inflation? Quite possibly.
So maybe, just maybe, that’s the plan. Shame they can’t tell us about it.
We might soon be looking at a very good time to stop hiding money under the mattress, or in cash accounts.
A lot of drivel has been written about whether, when Kevin Rudd referred to a “political sh*tstorm” on air, he was scripted.
Given the shockingly foul mouth he is reported to have in private it really wouldn’t much surprise me if it had been genuine.
What is more interesting, and less remarked on, is that senior Liberals are having to go on record with the allegation themselves.
If they had any friends in the media they’d have raised the idea over coffee or beer and watched their cat’s paw run with the idea in the press without having to be associated with any blowback.
Following on from Malcolm Turnbull having to personally have a go at Therese Rein’s fortune it suggests the Liberals are now in a position where they have no friends in the media at all and can only get their ideas reported by going on record with them.
That’s a terrible position for a party to be in. It could be the Costello fan club in the media are now withholding their favours.
This is, quite possibly, the very worst movie to ever go and see immediately after your partner announces you’re not in their vision of the future.
On the other hand the emotional trauma the movie inflicts on the audience is such that it does somewhat take one’s mind off one’s troubles.
So, if you’re wondering what it’s about…
It’s a superhero movie set in an alternate view of the mid ’80s.
The alternative world is based on two things:
One is that there are costumed heroes in the world. With the exception of the quasi-godlike “Dr Manhattan” they’re not super-powered. More masked avengers, although still able to punch through glass and bricks, and extremely fast. Think Captain America or Batman.
The other difference is the entirely possible scenario that Richard Nixon called in the CIA and the army, clung onto power through Watergate, and having bastardised the constitution won a string of elections to still be holding onto power in the mid 1980s. In reality Nixon was a better man than that, but all the evidence I’ve seen suggests it was a near run thing.
Sending his superheroes to the front line Nixon then won the Vietnam war.
So that’s the setting, a world where the hyper-wierdness of Nixon’s America has festered into something close to our own modernity.
It worries me slightly that younger audiences will struggle to sift historical fact from the fiction of this film, but don’t let that deter you.
Of greater deterrence is the hardcore violence (compound fractures abound) and Dr. Manhattan’s enourmous blue penis which, apparently by dint of a coat of paint, can be waved around throughout the three hours of the movie.
Early on there is, strictly speaking, far too much exposition. As with the last film I reviewed, Milk, there are too many flashbacks to illuminate the story and it’s best when it isn’t doing that. On the other hand it’s a really big story they’re trying to cram in.
Characters are actually developed. The worst turn out to be the best.
In the last quarter of the film some much needed uplifting themes are introduced. A very dark movie, which sees a huge number of protagonists die, actually has a happy ending.
I haven’t done this in years but I think I’ll go back and see it again while it’s at the cinema.
Five stars.
(Oh, and best line in a movie ever could quite possibly go to Jackie Earle Haley’s uncompromising and sociopathic “Rorschach”. Falsely imprisoned with the murderers and perverts he put behind bars, resorting to ultra-violence and howling to the cowed prisoners “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me”.)
UPDATED: The New York Times’ review has a thought exercise worryingly close to the mark:
“Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen†movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons†and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.
…
I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen†lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra†— would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen†is a good movie. I wouldn’t, though it is certainly better than the same director’s “300.†But it’s possible to imagine that our imaginary student would at least have found some food for thought in Mr. Snyder’s grandiose, meticulously art-directed vision of blood, cruelty and metaphysical dread. As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.
