Imperial Fruit: Bananas, Costs and Climate Change

The curved course of the ubiquitous banana has often been the peel…

The problems with a principled stand

In the past couple of weeks, the conservative parties have retained government…

Government approves Santos Barossa pipeline and sea dumping

The Australia Institute Media Release   Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Department has approved a…

If The Jackboots Actually Fit …

By Jane Salmon   If The Jackboots Actually Fit … Why Does Labor Keep…

Distinctions Without Difference: The Security Council on Gaza…

The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power…

How the supermarkets lost their way in Oz

By Callen Sorensen Karklis   Many Australians are heard saying that they’re feeling the…

Purgatorial Torments: Assange and the UK High Court

What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to…

Why A Punch In The Face May Be…

Now I'm not one who believes in violence as a solution to…

«
»
Facebook

Hockey plays golf with Trump while banks are hung out to dry

“He’s a good golfer and good company,” reports Joe Hockey, all atwitter at having played golf with Donald Trump

Our nation thrills to news, Monday, that our own $360,000 PA, Ambassador to the US, (plus $90,000 PA parliamentary pension), Joe, “The Age of Entitlement is Over”, Hockey, is golfing with Donald Trump, joining the president at the links, if not the hip, in yet another diplomatic coup for Tony Abbott’s failed treasurer.

Doubtless, “Sloppy Joe” will be talking up the president’s incredible success with his illegal Syrian missile strikes, a week ago, timed to distract from Stormy Daniels’ testimony and to beat weapons inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons with their pointless, pedantic search for evidence of chemical weapons. 

Who needs facts when you have tribal support? Our brave new world is characterised by the flight of reasoned empiricism before a tide of what David Roberts in Vox calls “tribal epistemology.” He quotes Russ Limbaugh

“We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap.”

In Limbaugh’s view, Roberts explains, the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to bipartisan authority – authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties — are fraudulent. There are no bipartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes. A similar mindset is emerging in Australia.

Clearly, only one’s own tribe can be trusted. (Who wants to trust a “universe of lies”?)

Tribal epistemology informs Peter Dutton’s dismissal of The ABC and The Guardian as dead to him. Sheesh! All he’s trying to do is spread false stories about the persecution of white South African farmers and arrange preferential immigration treatment so that they can swell the ranks of the right wing in his marginal, Dickson, QLD, electorate.

“There’s lots of outrage. Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC and on The Guardian, Huffington Post, express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it.”

Poor Peter. How wretched it is to be held to account. Erik Jensen, The Saturday Paper’s editor, lists seven refugees who have died under Peter Dutton’s regime as a result of the failure of his duty of care as Immigration Minister. They are also dead to him.  Yet it is clear from Dutton’s comment that he views himself as blameless.

Trump also acts as if he were beyond reproach. Always. His delusion is that he is a warrior in an ongoing battle against mainstream media – a media former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon called the opposition party.

Even assuming some empirical basis to his accusation of chemical warfare, however, Trump could explain to Hockey how his professed concern for the Syrian people; his empathy for their plight, is reflected in his accepting only 11 refugees from that nation, this year.

Trump’s hypocrisy in taking the high moral ground does not stop with his abandonment of the Syrian people, however. Joe would be well placed to ask why Assad’s use of chemical weapons provokes such a response when in Yemen, the US turns a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s use of white phosphorous. Are Saudis also “gas killing animals“?

Joe may also raise American troops’ use of depleted uranium, (DU) a weapon known to cause cancer and birth defects. DU was used in Syria in late 2015. U.S. Central Command (Centcom) spokesman Maj. Josh Jacques tells Airwars and Foreign Policy a report also confirmed by The Pentagon in The Washington Post, 16 February, that 5,265 armour-piercing 30 mm rounds containing depleted uranium were shot from Air Force A-10 fixed-wing aircraft on Nov. 16 and Nov. 22, 2015, destroying about 350 vehicles in the country’s eastern desert.

Joe could ask his latest, bestie The President, moreover, how it is that in Saudi Arabia’s neighbour, Yemen, 8.4 million people are on the brink of famine; how 11 million children, require humanitarian assistance, because of a Saudi-led, US, UK and Australia-backed military blockade, using hunger and disease as a weapon of war, in a country that imports 90 per cent of its food and most of its medicine, as Dr Lissa Johnson writes in New Matilda.

What a top opportunity to raise how 6.5 million Syrians have been internally displaced by war; the largest internally displaced population in the world. Hockey could explain how Illegal US airstrikes, prolong the war.

All Trump’s Tomahawk “strikes” will do for Syrian people is to lower their wretched existence until it matches the living hell suffered by Yemen’s population where 15 million people have no hospitals, no doctors, no drugs.

“Shoot first. Ask questions later” is the new State Department’s motto. It’s been a long time in the pipeline. In Clinton’s administration, development and diplomacy were cut 30%.  Hockey also cut Australia’s foreign aid budget by $7.6 billion in his 2014  budget, followed by a further $3.7billion reduction in his December budget update.

Now, the Coalition  expresses concern after David Wroe of Fairfax suggests China is building a military base in Vanuatu. Shock horror. It’s a drop, a planted story to enable Turnbull to sound off – and to gauge the reaction.

“We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbours of ours,” postures Turnbull. Unless, of course, they happen to be American bases.

The US operates permanent military bases throughout the Pacific, including in Australia, Japan (21 bases), Guam and South Korea. Australia is being highly selective about its megaphone diplomacy.

Perhaps Joe could talk economic equality and justice and how it is that the global increase in billionaires’ wealth in 2017 alone is enough to end extreme poverty seven times over. Tax cuts (or subsidies) for the rich will accelerate the process of burgeoning inequality, a symptom of both US and Australian politics’ toxic neoliberal infection.

Doubly subsidised by taxpayers in his political retirement, Hockey, as Treasurer, was quick to call out bludging mothers who “double dip” by claiming both workplace and taxpayer-funded paid parental leave schemes.

Of course it’s more than a stroke of luck that Joe scores a nine-hole round with the notorious cheat who is “unethical and untethered to truth”; a Mafia Don who is “ego-driven” and “about personal loyalty”, as former FBI Director James Comey flatters him, reports the Australian Financial Review. Joe’s always put in the hard yards.

“Since Hockey arrived at the Australian Embassy in Washington two years ago, the former treasurer has taken up golf to network with Trump officials, members of Congress and foreign diplomats.”

Hockey was also the sole guest to brave the rain; standing throughout Trump’s entire inauguration ceremony.  Why, Toady Joe can spot a “significant historic moment to ingratiate himself as effortlessly as he can judge a “good” golf “companion”.

“He cheats like hell,” 15-time LPGA Tour winner Suzann Pettersen says of her president. Unlike Comey, Pettersen does not make a big deal of Trump’s small glove size nor his too-long tie; nor the half-moons his tanning goggles leave under his eyes. She’ll leave such observations to the Trumpentariat. Instead she says tartly,

“He must pay his caddies well, as drives that are headed for the woods always end back up on the fairways.”

“So I don’t quite know how he is in business. They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business.” 

Australia must have a lot of golf cheats, Suzann. Cheating at business, it is clear this week, from testimony of some of the “industry’s” key players, is the only game in town – especially when it involves our banks; an oligopoly that controls all lending and borrowing of money or giving advice on what is quaintly termed “wealth creation” – or “wealth management’. Many Australians are ruined by being sold dud investment advice.

Sensational revelations of blood-sucking extortion, usury, bare-faced lying, robbery and a long litany of larcenies and law-breakings amaze and horrify audiences in this week’s installment of the long-awaited darkly, comic opera The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.

Round Two of the hearings, opened Monday in The Commonwealth Law Courts Melbourne and will run until 27 April. “Financial advice” is its focus, a service, bank staff attest, which is  always in the interests of the bank and not its customer  – a policy direction which has ruined more than a few clients.

Evidence given is a dagger to the heart of de-regulation and laissez-faire capitalism, a core article of faith in the Coalition’s neoliberal religion. Yet they were warned.

Labor’s reforms, The Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) were meant to address the conflicts of interest inherent in vertical integration but were undone by Finance Minister Matthias Cormann who talked Clive Palmer into supporting their repeal.

As Bernard Keane points out,

The big banks and AMP hated FOFA, because it directly undermined their vertically integrated model in which financial planners were paid commissions for steering customers into their wealth management products.

Yet in November 2014 Sam Dastyari, angered by how much of Labor’s FOFA was repealed by regulation, was able to exploit a rift between Clive Palmer and Jacqui Lambie to bring Ricky Muir with him to kill the repeal. It remains Sam’s finest hour.

Yet full credit must go to Adele Ferguson’s account of the fiasco which ensued when The Commonwealth Banks’s wealth management arm, Commonwealth Financial Planning (CFP), gave evidence before a Senate inquiry into the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ASIC.

Labor’s Mark Bishop and Nationals’ John Wacka Williams led and focused the inquiry on ASIC’s bungling of the CPP case. The encounter irreparably damaged the reputation of ASIC and of the CBA.

Westpac and ANZ quickly divested themselves of their wealth management – and later their insurance arms both areas of conflict of interest which have caused negative publicity. Only Westpac now continues to run either.  Now, we are told, banks will go back to core business, their virtue restored. But can anyone believe that?

Self-regulation, clearly, is a sham. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, (ASIC), the corporate regulator or “tough cop on the beat” which Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Kelly O’Dwyer, Josh Frydenberg, Peter Dutton (and any other government member with a set of talking points) never tire of pretending is more powerful than a Royal Commission stands exposed as utterly ineffectual, conflicted.

Perhaps it suffers Stockholm syndrome. Captured, like the ATO, by the sector it is set up to regulate, ASIC ministers to the needs of industry not consumers. It remains chronically under-funded, suffering” efficiency dividends”, under Labor and more funding cuts during the ill-fated Abbott government experiment – cuts which, despite government rhetoric, have never been fully restored.

300 ASIC staff have been shed since 2014.

Starring the Honourable Kenneth Madison Hayne AC QC, who, again, wins Beak of the Week for incomparable diligence, his talented assistant, Ms Rowena Orr QC, puts the cross back into cross-examination, in a crucifying performance which steals the show in a multimedia production live-streamed on the web. It’s damning.

Customers’ signatures are forged, admit the pin-striped suits, clients are impersonated, power of attorney is got by fraud, documents are falsely witnessed, customer’s funds transferred to advisers’ personal accounts.

Even the grave is no protection from these “Greed is Good” post-truth Gordon Geckos on steroids.

The Commonwealth Bank (CBA) confesses that it has taken fees from some deceased clients, including one who’d been pushing up the daisies for ten years- fees, moreover, it was never entitled to had its client been alive.

Fee for no service“, explains Peter Kell, deputy chair of ASIC, the bankers’ lapdog, in his written testimony, or “fee for no service” is used “when a customer is paying a periodic ongoing service fee for services that the licensee or adviser does not actually provide and that the customer does not actually receive.”

Naturally, as you would expect with self-regulation, CBA is on to it in a flash. A good four years goes into stonewalling; ignoring complaints. Two more years, it stalls; paper-shuffling “reports”.

Finally, some bright spark notifies The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, (ASIC), a financial regulator whom the Turnbull government has been telling us for years is more powerful than a Royal Commission.

The nation thrills to the inimitable Ms Orr QC, in her knock-out role as assistant to the commissioner. Orr demands straight talk; honest answers from a gang of knaves, liars and thieves as played by a cast of villains’ fall-guys and patsies from AMP, CBA and Westpac in Corporate Lies, Fraud, Extortion and Boundless Greed – this week’s episode.

Not only is Ms Orr on song, she is an impeccably researched inquisitor who knows what the banks are up to.

Bankers hang themselves out to dry in a show which, exposes, as Tony Abbott, might put it, The Great Big Old Hoax of corporate self-regulation. The hearings so far have shown banks can lie with impunity to the regulator. Evidence so far shows it is neither a few bad apples nor the corruption inherent in diversifying into insurance and investment advice, but rather that banking suffers a systemic blight.

As Keane notes, the Royal Commission is not exposing flaws in the system – this is the system. Concentration has not benefited the consumer but has led to banks seeking greater power over the customer. ASIC has been a Clayton’s regulator; too timid to blow the whistle and so anxious to avoid litigation that it prefers to collude or as Keane kindly puts it, “work with” the industry.

Political protection is built into the system.  AMP, Macquarie and others have contributed $3.85 million in donations to the Coalition since 2010, while $2.66 million has been invested in Labor.

Above all, Anna Bligh, a former Labor premier heads the Australian Banking Association while NSW Mike Baird received $900,000 after his first six months at the head of NAB’s corporate and institutional unit.

Finally, taking a leaf out of Coalition energy and economics policy spin, our banks shrewdly deploy “independent reports” which are in fact heavily skewed in their favour. The Commission hears that the independent report AMP commissions from Clayton Utz is repeatedly edited by a variety of AMP staff right up to board level.

Top marks to the producers, too, for their magical realism, especially Screaming Scott Morrison who rubbished the call for commission into banking as a “populist whinge” in 2016 and which he and his PM voted against 23 times but which the Turnbull government now hails as a triumph of its own invention even demanding applause for setting the terms of reference so wide they’re bound to catch every banking shonk and shyster in the land.

The Royal Commission into banking unfolds a byzantine tale of deception and betrayal, helped in no small measure by a stellar line-up of performers including AMP’s libretto of lying to ASIC, fiddling reports, dudding clients and charging fees for no service.

For the government it is more than an acute embarrassment; it is an indictment.   Proved hollow is their faith in the powerful corporate regulator, ASIC, now revealed to be a toothless tiger while their spin that a few rotten apples must not cause us to fear that the root and branch of the banking system seems patently absurd. In fact, the Commission is providing abundant evidence the opposite is true.

Sadly for Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition, the stench of corruption in our banking system comes just as it must persuade just a few more cross-benchers that a great big new tax break, to adapt Tony Abbott’s anti-carbon slogan is urgently needed  – when it will in effect reward the banks’ failure to operate a fair, open and accountable system – adding, Bill Shorten argues, $7 billion dollars to the big banks’ bottom line.

Of course, screaming ScoMo rants, there’ll be hefty fines and even ten-year prison sentences. But when did you last hear of a banker going to jail? As for the fines, they’ll be HUGE – up to $10.5 million, three times the illicit gains or loss illegally avoided. 10 per cent of annual turnover. But fines will be capped at $210 million. And they won’t be retrospective. CBA’s profit was 9.9 billion last financial year. The proposed cap is 2% of that.

Yet by Sunday we hear that the Royal Commission is all the Coalition’s idea. It’s breadth. Turnbull’s brilliant broad-ranging approach plus the hard work done earlier and the sterling offices of ASIC have directly led the big four to spill their guts. It wouldn’t have happened under Labor. (Nor under The Greens whose call it was.)

Baloney. As a number of commentators note, the government must take us all for mugs. The new spin is contradicted by the evidence. Labor’s plan was rejected because the Coalition said it was so wide-ranging it would destroy our confidence and wreck the whole banking system. Now wide-ranging is good?

In truth, the Coalition was dragged kicking and screaming into setting up the Royal Commission. What the government runs instead is a protection racket for a banking industry that breaks the law with impunity – a mob who knows shrewdly that even after the show trial and the ritual blood-letting, it’ll be business as usual because “they are too big to fail.” Too tightly integrated into each major party’s machine.

The situation is not helped by the talking points that the PM’s turd polishing unit has given to the likes of Scott Morrison, Kelly O’Dwyer and even Republican at heart Malcolm Turnbull who, must speak from London as duty calls him away to tweet his way through Prince William’s waffling on to open CHOGM,  – an organisation, which, like the Cheshire Cat is fading away leaving nothing behind but its smile or the promise of good intentions – give or take a few vapid clichés of colourful diversity – or meeting interesting people, or as Prince Will puts it “the mother of all networks”.

The British Empire, it is said was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. It’s devolution into Commonwealth and now its genial atrophy into pleasantries and hearty handshakes all round is similarly out of focus; an exemplary model of indirection and self-extinction.

If only our banking system; that many-headed, malignant, blood-sucking, toxic, monster parasite could exit our nation’s body politic, our commonwealth as painlessly.

 

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.

You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969

Donate Button

7 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Graeme Henchel

    Hockey of the over blow

    The treasurer’s name was Hockey, a big buffoon quite stocky
    Though some had come to call him Smokin Joe
    Him and mate Mathias were barefaced blatant liars
    and had no idea of how to run the show

    Joe would break into a sweat as he lied about the debt
    and the “Age of entitlement as over”
    But he didn’t have the guts to tell the poor they’d get the cuts
    While he and all his mates still lived in clover

    He had a sham review with a hand picked right wing crew
    A strategy that had worked for them before
    Duly said the stacked committee, that things were not so pretty
    Then Joe’s promises were promises no more

    On the best day of his life, Joe was dancing with his wife
    before delivering a budget most unfair
    But Joe went much too far when he smoked a fat cigar
    and the stench of Hockey hubris filled the air

    Joe thought he’d pulled a swifty, but he quickly looked quite shifty
    as the cuts all clearly targeted the poor
    Sure they’d cut the carbon tax, but if you looked into the facts
    the poorest in the land were paying more

    Though he started out quite cocky things went pear shaped for Joe Hockey
    as the senate started blocking his key plans
    At first he tried to bluster, blowing hard as he could muster
    but the senate simply sat upon their hands

    With the budget really smelling, Joe tried to do some selling
    but his comments only served to make things worse
    “The poor don’t drive a car” said the man with the cigar
    as his tone became belligerent and terse

    As the public came apprised of Joe and the Thug’s lies
    the polls went into terminal decline
    Though the Thug took most the blame, it was often Hockey’s name
    that was mentioned in a sentence with “resign”

    After months of changing tune and with policies marooned
    the Thug’s fate started coming under question
    It was suddenly okay to negotiate away
    but the senate held their ground on the suggestion

    So Joe kept his head down, some were calling him a clown
    while the Thug talked of barnacle removal
    They announced some half arsed flips but before they’d left their lips
    they were met with more howls of disapproval

    So after 18 months of farce, Joe was out to save his arse
    Through pursed lips he said, he may have overblown
    Now as a last resort he’ll abuse the inter generational report
    but it won’t be enough for Hockey to atone

    With a new budget due, they just didn’t have a clue
    so the Thug and Joe posed for a photo opp
    No longer matching ties, but still the matching lies
    As they worked upon another budget flop

    And just few weeks on, you could start to see the con
    As data shows we’re heading for recession
    Whatever plan they had is quickly turning bad
    And soon we’ll hear new talk of a succession

    Questioned ’bout the housing bubble, Joe is once more in trouble
    “Get a good job that pays good money”
    Oh Smokin Joe, he just don’t know
    If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny

    Now he’s in the shit knee deep and talking bracket creep
    In a desperate attempt to buy some ticks
    GST the poor so the rich can have some more
    Straight from the Howard bag of tricks

    Hockey’s fate is tightly tied to the Thug who always lied
    So the futures not too bright for Smokin Joe
    It now won’t be too long before the Thug is gone
    and takes with him “Hockey of the Over Blow”

    And so it came to pass, they gave the Thug the arse
    The Wanker from Wentworth would run the show
    In amongst the fuss the Thug threw Joe under the bus
    And so we’ve seen the last of Smokin Joe

    But wait there’s more as Joe is going out the door
    He gets to keep his snout well in the trough
    A diplomatic job so this leaner can fill his gob
    For Smokin Joe’s not one to do things tough

  2. David Tyler

    Excellent, Graeme. Your historical account and insights are fiendishly accurate. Spot on. And enjoyable. Ought to be in politics and history textbooks.
    David Tyler

  3. New England Cocky

    Oh GH, what a wonderfully mischievous mind!!

    Taking only the Sloppy Joe point for discussion from this excellent analysis: The lack of sympathy or empathy shown by Sloppy Joe for Palestinians, Syrians and Yemenis may be in part attributed to his Jewish heritage and possibly Zionist leanings. Personally I grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood and have a lot of Jewish friends, but present celebrations in Jerusalem leave me pondering the question: “What is the difference between a Nazi jack-boot on the throat of a Jewish teenager in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and an Israeli Defence Force jack-boot on the throat of a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank in 2018”?

    The answer is “75 years”.

  4. Henry Rodrigues

    Graeme…….. Thanks for that succinct description of the fat bludger. Looks like he’s found his level of slime, rubbing shoulders with the pussy grabber Trump. He knows he’s for the chop when Labor get in,

  5. Frank Smith

    Thank You David, And Thank You Graeme! Both very astute contributions.

    I hope the spruked up “improvement” in the Coalition’s appeal in the latest Newspoll is just a statistical aberration. How can such an inept, untruthful and anti-democratic Government that is continuously damaging the country even be within “cooee distance” of an increasingly capable and competent Opposition? I have wondered this since Sloppy Joe brought down that disastrous first budget of the Abbott Government. So too, I, like many, am incredulous that the American people could elect someone as incompetent as Sloppy Joe’s new-found golfing mate Donald Trump to be their President. And, after all the disastrous decisions the Trump Administration has made, why do the Republicans and Trump’s “base” continue to support the evil that the fool is doing all over the world? I found a partial answer in a very interesting article in today’s Politico which I know many AIMNers will find quite illuminating. There are some similar signs of this troubling link between right-wing religious movements and Conservative politicians here in Australia that all of us need to remain aware and wary of.

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/22/trump-christian-evangelical-conservatives-television-tbn-cbn-218008

  6. Glenn Barry

    David, wonderful article yet again – one of your references to the article mentioning Rush Limbaugh was truly enlightening…

    It doesn’t take much to see that very same transmogrification occurring here

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page