‘Neo-liberal’ Rudd covers for the banks

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release 20th of February 2009

‘Neo-liberal’ Rudd covers for the banks

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had the chance this week to declare his support for an investigation of the role of the banks in the current economic crisis, and he shirked the issue.

At Tuesday night’s Community Cabinet meeting in Campbelltown, NSW, the Citizens Electoral Council’s NSW State Secretary Ann Lawler asked the Prime Minister, “Mr Rudd, I was very happy to hear that you will fight this global financial crisis with the full gambit of the government, so that would mean you would support a Pecora Commission, an investigation into the banking structure. After all, our Australian banks are carrying over $14 trillion in derivatives debt that no amount of bailout or stimulus can pay, without creating the type of hyperinflation experienced by Weimar Germany in 1923. Therefore, would you support an investigation into the banking system?”

Mr Rudd’s response was to not respond, resorting to a typically vague assurance that such matters would be discussed at the G-20 meeting in April; his tactic was not lost on the audience, many of whom noted, “He didn’t answer the question.”

However, Mr Rudd’s reference to the G-20 did give the game away: ever since the drama-packed build-up to the G-20 meeting in Washington, DC in November (which ultimately achieved nothing), Rudd has committed Australia to support British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s policy response to the global financial crisis, which is to work through the G-20 to achieve the ultimate stage of globalisation—globally-imposed financial regulation.

In other words, his response to the crisis caused by globalisation, is to impose more globalisation.

What he won’t do, is use the power of the national government to bring the banks to account for their legal and moral crimes, put them through bankruptcy reorganisation, cancel their unpayable derivatives obligations, and re-impose the national regulations that John Howard, Bob Hawke, and Paul Keating should never have scrapped in the first place.

He won’t do this, because a national response, is anathema to his neo-liberal globalisation ideology.

The only national response Mr Rudd is willing to undertake, is to commit the nation’s financial resources to bailing out and propping up the globalised banks.

While the Prime Minister continues on this path, he is perpetuating the criminal financial régime ushered in by Howard, Hawke and Keating, and condemning Australia to economic ruin.

The alternative to the Rudd/Brown globalist response to the global financial crisis, is American statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods proposal to scrap globalisation, put the world financial system into bankruptcy reorganisation, cancel the global $1.4 quadrillion derivatives bubble, and get nations to set fixed currency exchange rates, capital controls, and establish their own national banks for re-investment in basic economic infrastructure and productive industries.

National governments will only be free to act on this perspective, if the power held over them by the private banking system is broken; hence, Lyndon LaRouche’s call for a new Pecora Commission to investigate and clean up Wall Street, and CEC leader Craig Isherwood’s call for an Australian Pecora Commission “into the corruption and to possible criminality of the Australian financial system.”

Click here to sign the CEC’s call for an Australian Pecora Commission.

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