I’ve lost count of how much bailout money governments have thrown at the global financial crisis. We all remember the US$700 billion that the US Congress recently approved, but in the months before that the US Reserve had already dished out nearly the same amount in bailouts, buyouts and guarantees for bad loans.
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Green Left Weekly is launching a campaign for an extra 350 subscriptions before the end of 2008. Every new subscription helps build a people-powered movement for change and you can help us!
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Miranda Devine is usually the first to turn a ridiculous right-wing rant into a newspaper column.
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“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention”, affirmed US President George W. Bush, in his September 24 television speech to promote the biggest corporate bailout plan since the Great Depression. “I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business.”
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Bruno, a supporter of Green Left Weekly, said to me last week that the political situation today reminded him of a famous quote from a story about a Sicilian prince at the time Italy’s feudal principalities were being challenged by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts”:
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Every now and then the mask slips and we see the true face of the corporate dictatorship that Every now and then the mask slips and we see the true face of the corporate dictatorship that pretends to be democratic Australia.to be democratic Australia.
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There is good news and bad news. Let's have the bad news first.
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Which bank? Umm, the whole lot of them, actually. But let’s start with “the bank”, the Commonwealth Bank, because its profit report came out last week.
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Having raised a total of $129,040 for the 2008 Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund, we are now more than half-way to our $250,000 target. Our supporters raised $5440 over the last week through donations and several successful fundraising events around the country.
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Remember the “wealth effect”? Rapidly rising housing and share prices made people feel wealthy and so they borrowed big-time and became big-time spenders, and this supposedly makes for an endless economic boom. Just about every capitalist economist was singing from that cheery song sheet — until recently.
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When federal environment minister Peter Garrett paid a visit to a Sydney public primary school last term he discovered that the school had installed enough solar panels to supply three-quarters of its electricity needs.
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We could see this disappointment coming a mile off. First, Professor Ross Garnauts report tells us the global warming problem is dire and demands immediate response, but then, he comes to the diabolical conclusion that we should leave the solution to a dodgy market mechanism: carbon pollution permit trading. Now, the Rudd Labor governments Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme green paper on this all-important challenge offers to hand the biggest carbon polluting companies free permits to pollute.