Bankers, war party should beware the shifting spirit of the times!

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Lead Editorial

14 February 2024
Vol. 26 No. 7

Across the nation people, politicians and even media outlets are turning to the Australian Citizens Party to understand the dramatically changing political landscape.

Likewise, across the world, the population is attuned to understanding the process which has put us on the edge of World War III. Witness the over 200 million views on Tucker Carlson’s X (Twitter) account, and over 16 million views on his YouTube channel, of the interview he conducted with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Those who watched Putin’s first interview with Western media since Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began two years ago, all received a radically different version of events than that presented in the mainstream press. This included not only the historical context for events, but a true account of the British sabotage of peace negotiations, the rebuttal of accusations of Russian territorial ambitions in or beyond Ukraine, and Russia’s willingness to reopen peace talks at any time, in a way that affords dignity, in Putin’s words, to Ukraine, the USA and NATO.

A new front has opened on the local battleground, namely, the fight against banks closing branches, exacting their “pound of flesh” from citizens to “fight inflation”, and to stop the government giving away its oversight of the Reserve Bank. That came when state Premiers entered the fray. Despite a complete lack of understanding of the reality that it is the Treasurer who must pull the RBA into line, their intervention on behalf of homeowners brings a new focus to the push to give away government override powers proposed in the Reserve Bank Reforms Bill 2023.

This fight has been brought to the Senate Standing Committee on Economics by hundreds of concerned Australians and by the ACP, which in its submission presented a timeline showing that the removal of government controls over banking was a precondition for the new post-2008-crisis financial regime that includes “bail-in”, a regime to facilitate unprecedented looting of the population—even stealing their bank deposits—to save the banking system. Chalmers is no Johnny-come-lately to this agenda. During the global financial crisis, which allowed this regime to be rolled out, he worked as Treasurer Wayne Swan’s Chief of Staff and principal advisor. Swan and then-PM Kevin Rudd led the charge to make the Group of 20 the premier forum to deal with the crisis, spearheading the push for a globally coordinated mega-bank bailout and the transition into bail-in. All this was dictated by the new G20 creature, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), which was spawned by this process in 2009 and hosted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The aim was to take decisions out of the broader United Nations forum, where numerous developing nations were determined to use the global crisis to achieve financial reforms that would benefit all, rather than entrenching top-down control of all banking by the BIS. Giving developing nations a say would have seen the fair and just financial architecture presently being unfurled by the growing BRICS grouping come into reality much earlier.

But events conspired to move the world in this direction anyway and today the zeitgeist—the defining spirit or mood of this period of history—is ripe for our message.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the sneaky passage of Australia’s bail-in law during the infamous St. Valentine’s Day massacre of democracy on 14 February 2018. But the impact of that bill can yet be undone: the passage of today’s RBA legislation is necessary to secure the topdown global control of finance the 2018 bill was intended to enshrine. It’s time to light a fire under the Opposition who could block the RBA bill (p.3), an act that would have mammoth repercussions, locally and internationally. It’s possible, as English poet Percy B. Shelley wrote, that “even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve ... the spirit of the age.”

In this issue:

• Premiers, Opposition must stop Chalmers surrendering power to bankers
• REMINDER: Watch Mr Bates vs the Post Office 8:55 PM tonight and next week on Channel 7
• Third of NAB’s regional banks wiped in CEO’s reign of terror
• A bank for customers? Bankers speak with forked tongue
• Tax Office’s civil war over PwC puts spotlight on the failure of neoliberalism
• What our media isn’t reporting about the ‘Australian writer’ sentenced in China
• Explosive! Has WA’s minister for commerce lied to Sterling First tenants?
• China’s new crackdown on financial speculation
• The larger agenda of RBA independence: Propping up a failing global financial system
• Endangered: Banks, Post Offices, and the government!
• The costs of higher interest rates
• ALMANAC: The Australian Precedents for a Hamiltonian Credit System - Part I

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