athos wrote on Aug 12^th, 2010 at 12:19pm:


Yup, as I've been suggesting for ages: it is time for humanity to wake up and stop shuffling Mickey Mouse Monopoly Money and chasing our own tails, to feed the insatiable and destructive Growth Fairy!

Sprintcyclist wrote on Aug 12^th, 2010 at 12:48pm:


LOL...suppose it had to happen sooner or later - and I'm certainly glad that it was on something as important as the gist of this! Now to find some common ground on the details, eh!?

Sprintcyclist wrote on Aug 12^th, 2010 at 12:56pm:


You mean they owe too much to the Left, something like that.

is it *already* bankrupt?! Of course it's already bankrupt, it's been bankrupt since before the global economic crisis, the crisis was just one among a number of end results. This has been all over the global internet news now for over two years - where do Australians usually have their heads?

Now, here's the lesson for Australia: America owes so much in deficits that it can never be paid back. Let me repeat - it can never be paid back, and it is getting worse every minute.
What do you suppose governments like to do in that situation - (hint: think Zimbabwe) - they actually print money - big time - so that they devalue the currency big time: then the debt isn't worth as much. Easy.
That's what they've been doing in America and England too for the last two years or more - they call it "quantitative easing" (another lefty b*sht jargon word), deliberately constructed so that *you* can't understand it.
All this extra money they print "inflates" the money supply and creates "inflation" (now there's a word we can understand). When inflation goes up, you might remember that places like the U.S. Fed and the Australian Reserve bank put up interest rates, and then people with big mortgages start losing their homes.
Interest rates go up because the money isn't worth what it used to be, because it is "inflated", and the banks still want their value back, so they increase the interest "price" of that money you borrowed.
And believe it or not, America has kept an artificial lid on their interest rates despite all this going on (it is like a lid on a pressure cooker, and it will blow sky high eventually). Then you will have hyperinflation, together with deflation, a deadly combination called stagflation.

Australia has followed the same route courtesy of the lefty laborites copying everything Barack Obama does, because they identify with him I suppose, and they don't have any other answers of their own.
We are lucky that we live in the country that we do, because our resources sector has cushioned us against all this, so we don't have as big a deficit as other places, like America and England - and we wouldn't have had any had you not voted labor in in 2007, because you thought John Howard was grumpy old man. Now you have a bunch of clueless numpties running the place and throwing our money away. When this dam breaks, every man and his dog will want to come to Australia.

We will need a very strong backbone to run this country from any time very soon to over the next number of years, because if you thought there had been a financial tsunami already, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Is America bankrupt - you better believe it.
The problem for Australians is that they're only just waking up to this now, years and years too late, and that includes the labor party, but when the s*ht hits the fan, which it will, they will be very quick to get up and start laying the blame at other people's feet.
Costello knew this was coming, and he said so.

Bottom line: the libs had a surplus, they were not bankrupt;
labor now has massive deficits at the very time in world history when that is the worst possible thing to be doing. They are lucky they haven't had enough time to make it worse, which they will if they get another term.

So I guess the moral of the local story in these times is:

*if you have a big mortgage, and you want to lose your home and go bankrupt in the process in the next three or four years, go ahead and vote labor."
It's already happened to millions of people in America, now they're lined up in their thousands for a handful of public housing, no where near enough to go round, and the country bankrupt and can't build more.

It can get a whole lot worse, folks, if you keep spending more than you earn, same for governments. They look like big spenders; you pay.

that's exactly the sort of communistic rhetoric that leads to words like "quantitative easing" and "let's print more money so people have more money in their hands". It is dangerous, cynical, stupid stuff. Ever since the Great Depression in 1930s, people and governments with these ideas have been increasingly gaining power and influence, (they're called Keynesians), especially like the Australian Labor Party - and what has the world come to now for all of that?
You cannot keep spending more than what you earn, that's a simple fact, someone has to pay the price when the music stops. Keynesians (labor people) think that that is nonsense, you can keep spending more than you earn, and they think it is a marvellous thing to do.
These are the sorts of cretins that you have running western countries now. They used to run communist countries as well, until they failed, but they're alive and well in western countries. They're called champagne socialists here.

When you say what I have said, in Australia this hits a very raw nerve with these people, and you get people like equitist scrambling to react, because she knows it is a critical challenge to the very basis on which she and people like her operate.
She is a brainwashed leftie.

What Equitist said.

I can only be flabbergasted at the web of lies that the uber-capitalists still try to spin. Can't they see who created the GFC?
It's probably fortunate that economies were already in freefall at the time of uber-right winged governments so that at least the history annals can tell the true story.
As per usual, the more left winged governments inherit the mess until greed becomes good again.

Wasting time, trading bits of paper (or pixels on a screen) in the name of artificial wealth the way of the uber-capitalists. They produce nothing of any worthwhile investment to a nation.
It's the hard work of the masses that produces a nation's wealth, and it's been proven time and time again that when this wealth is usurped by the greedy, the nation will suffer.

Did somebody actually say that the Labor party sniffs the bum of the U.S.?

Puhleease..

mantra wrote on Aug 13^th, 2010 at 7:46am:


Can't forget that Australian families were better off back then either.

Quote:


No we don't forget all of those things that we talked and debated about on "Cracker" do we Mantra?
The impending housing crisis, Keating's words of warning for overdriving an economy, the lack of investment in infrastructure, the selloff of public utilities, the folly of workchoices, the spending on illegal wars..etc.
It hardly compares to a stuff-up on insulation spending does it?

In Abbott's defense (sort of), he didn't seem too enthralled with Howard's words in that clip. Maybe Alan Pease (the body language expert) could decifer a bit of body language with the finger in the ear and the touching of the nose there. I've no idea what he'd make of tasting some earwax.

I doubt if we'd be getting anything near the misguided ruthlessness of Howard if Abbott were to pull it off, but the libs have shown that they will be subserviant to a dictator, and that's not what our political parties are supposed to be about.

Gillard always shows a very cool head, and I think that's reflected in the latest polls that this is what the people want.
The Labor party has traditionally kept itself at arms length to U.S. idealisms and we don't want to get any closer to their failures now.
We're doing OK with Labor. A cool head and the stabilising influence of an intelligent woman will be a good investment in our country's future.

Who would seriously want a Bush/Howard alliance governing our country now?i

athos wrote on Aug 12^th, 2010 at 2:50pm:


Easy, don't pay it back. The US and the West have gotten themselves into this stupid position because the greed of capitalism...I mean seriously..how stupid to invest in and industrialise your enemy unless you are then going to rip them back off.

Love to see the Chinese government and Chinese capitalism get screwed.

The Corporate West leaders should all then be strung up in the streets.

Amadd wrote on Aug 13^th, 2010 at 10:16am:


Must have been, considering that wages have stayed stagnant for so long whilst the cost of living has been rising all that time, I fail to see how anyone could have missed that.

Thankyou 

mantra wrote on Aug 13^th, 2010 at 7:46am:


So true Mantra, just to add: And endless poisoning of the environment

mantra, it is not the U.S. or Washington poisoning our environment. It is Australians and Australian industry. What the consumers don't have is *choice* - if you want to, for example, drive a car that has a lighter environmental footprint, until recently you didn't have a *choice*. Hydrogen cars are the best, but - can you buy them? Of course not.
There is nothing stopping Australian industry from developing this technology, as well as affordable super efficient solar cells. But they don't. They want to keep digging up the coal, and the irony is that the tax revenue from those rivers of "black gold" is what keeps this country from sinking like the rest of them did. It's an internal dilemma, but one born out of luckily having all these natural resources. You will see within a few years how desperate things can get when Australia runs out of oil for petrol. Petrol could end up $5.00 a litre. No problem.

Mantra, Howard was not an evil person. He is a good man, he is an older fashioned type of Australian though, and to write someone off like that just because your generation does not think like that, is writing off your Australian grandparents and great grandparents. Howard definitely was of an earlier Australian generation, but he is a good Australian, and a good man.
Remember not to judge people just because of your political perspectives, or just because they are "older than you". You will be old one day, and the younger people are going to think you are a complete waste of space probably. Australians tend to think like that about older people, it is a national trait, which other countries and cultures abhor about us.
Think about it. You are on this forum for a start, and you are thinking about it, so learn from other perspectives as well.
Cheers.

Australian. There's a big difference.
And being Australian doesn't mean that you're a lefty commy aussie, or a "greedy capitalist" either.
It means being Australian.