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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Thursday, 30 January 2014

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

‘Missionary’ Abbott’s anti-Christian creed: banks and markets first!

Prime Minister Tony Abbott perversely invoked a religious motif for his anti-Christian message to the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland, that banks and markets must come first, ahead of the people.

While Pope Francis has used his first Encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), to attack the current free trade system as “an economy of exclusion and inequality” which kills, the supposedly devout Catholic Abbott declared at Davos on 23 January, “We should all be missionaries for freer trade.”

Abbott attended Davos to stamp Australia’s authority as the current president of the G20, responsible for overseeing the implementation of a G20-wide “bail-in” regime by the time of the Brisbane G20 meeting in November. His Davos speech showed that he is enthusiastic about the G20 agenda.

Firstly, he flat out lied to rewrite history, brazenly asserting that the 2008 meltdown of the global derivatives bubble “was not a crisis of markets but one of governance.” [Emphasis added.]

However, the G20, according to Abbott, played a crucial role in preventing “another great depression”.

Abbott didn’t specify that the centrepiece of the G20’s financial stability agenda since 2009 has been its commitment to protect TBTF (too-big-to-fail) banks through the policy of bail-in, whereby creditors, including depositors, forfeit their accounts in order to keep failed TBTF banks afloat. With the global financial system currently convulsing in reaction to U.S. Federal Reserve “tapering” and a new “reverse carry trade” currency panic, the bankers are running out of time to add this bail-in capacity to their so-called “resolution toolbox”. Reflecting their urgency, Abbott stated, “These reforms do now need to be finalised.”

By signing on to the G20 commitment to save the TBTF banks at all costs—including the very lives of the people—Abbott is consciously subverting the principle that government must serve the common good. Instead, to his philosophy, government must ensure the profitability of private business, because, he claimed, wealth isn’t created by governments, but by profitable businesses. “Markets are the proven answer to the problem of scarcity,” he intoned.

After reviewing Abbott’s speech, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood railed, “Abbott is revealing a chilling anti-Christian ideology, which is evident in the dichotomy between his views and those of the present Pope. His ideology is also factually rubbish: governments do create wealth. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was created by the government. It is one of the greatest assets Australia has. In fact, governments arguably create more wealth than private businesses, especially big businesses, because the big business parasites that Abbott represents are always demanding that governments privatise public assets so they can get their greedy mitts on them.

“If the Abbott government was not ideologically locked in to putting markets and banks ahead of people they would have already made moves to scrap bail-in and instead implement a Glass-Steagall separation of retail banks from speculative investment banks, because it is such an obvious solution! It would immediately solve the TBTF problem—the banks would be smaller, but functional, once you take the hot air of speculation out of the equation.

“Once Glass-Steagall is in place we can get down to the business of rebuilding our economy, by focusing on directing public credit into nation-building projects, not on further unleashing the so-called ‘market forces’ that created the collapsing financial bubble in the first place.

Join the CEC if you want to get that job done.”

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s new pamphlet, Glass-Steagall NOW!, which shows how stopping the global financial meltdown begins with Glass-Steagall.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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