Fascist Iemma’s “Public Funding” Scam Targets You!

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New South Wales ALP Premier Morris Iemma is currently crusading to ban all private donations to political parties in favour of public funding, to “stop corruption”. Are the major parties at the top really stinking cesspools of corruption? A cynic might counter, “Does a wild bear poo in the woods?” But the actual target of Iemma and the financiers who own him is you. Here’s how it works.

Beginning with Hawke and Keating in 1983, the major banks and corporations poured billions into both the ALP and the Coalition. In return they received hundreds of billions in privatised former public assets, in public-private partnerships (PPPs), and other loot through the ALP/Coalition’s savage orgy of deregulation, privatisation and free trade. Now they want you, the taxpayer, to pick up the tab. They know that—unlike Iemma’s real target, the mass-based Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), the associates of the American statesman and physical economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.—the ALP/Coalition are basically shells, which would not survive for a minute without corporate or public funding. Therefore these corporations are already now starting to withhold contributions in order to ram through public funding.

Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini explained the essence of what is now afoot in Australia in his 1932 manifesto, The Doctrine of Fascism: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporativism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” The CEC’s just-released explosive exposé, “British Empire Terrified of LaRouche in Australia”, documents how corporativism has taken over here under the rubric “competition policy”, and how it is all run out of London via Britain’s imperial Hill Samuel bank, now known as Macquarie.

Hawke and his successor Keating set up “competition policy” via the 1993 “Hilmer Review”. Fred Hilmer was then a board member of Macquarie, the chief beneficiary of competition policy. The review set up two institutions with dictatorial powers: the National Competition Council (NCC) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Both were chaired, in turn, from almost the outset until today by Graeme Samuel—a longtime top executive of Hill Samuel/Macquarie! Look at NSW today, for an example of how this works.

Mr. Public Funding Iemma’s stated reason for privatising NSW’s $15 billion electricity industry is to finance an extension of Macquarie’s M4 motorway. His predecessor, the pro-privatisation Bob Carr, now gets $500,000 per year as a Macquarie “consultant”. Paul Keating, whose little sister has held a lucrative job with Macquarie, is twisting arms to ram through this privatisation, while Keating himself chairs a subsidiary of London’s arch-privatising Lazard Frères bank. Lazard has fascist connections dating from before World War II, and the bank’s top official Felix Rohatyn helped install the fascist Augusto Pinochet in power in Chile—who then privatised everything in sight.

Aside from targetting the CEC, these British corporativists figure that now that free trade, privatisation, etc. are so entrenched in the “major” parties (and in the popular mind), and the process is so far advanced anyway, “Why should we keep paying these Lib/Lab clowns? Make the public do it.” And, as the CEC exposé documents, these same British-run banks and corporations and their co-thinker allies in Federal and State governments are now devastating and looting our local councils through amalgamations.

British Empire Terrified of LaRouche in Australia

Special to the New Citizen

A specter is haunting the British Empire in Australia—the specter of American statesman and physical economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Amidst a crushing British imperial assault against virtually every nation in the world, support for LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) as an urgent defense of Australia’s national sovereignty, has exploded at the grassroots level in local councils across the nation. At stake is both Australia’s very existence as a civilized nation, one already ravaged by the new forms of British imperialism such as public-private partnerships (PPPs), privatization, and free trade, as well as the role which this Pacific nation will play in Asia: cat’s paw for the City of London-centered British Empire, as demanded most recently by Britain’s Foreign Minister David Miliband and Trade and Industry Minister Lord Digby Jones, or spearhead for American System methods of agro-industrial development urgently needed by the nations of Asia, as advocated by LaRouche and his Australian associates in the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) and the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) political party.

Such is the context for New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma’s present crusade on behalf of the British financial oligarchy for an electoral “reform” to ban all private contributions to political parties—a “reform” transparently aimed at driving LaRouche’s associates from the Australian continent. It is the latest in a series of British assaults since the CEC opened its national office in Melbourne in October 1992. Already then, British Privy Council asset Isi Leibler, a Melbourne businessman, nominal “Jewish community leader” and supporter of Jewish fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky, warned that if not stopped, “LaRouche will become the most disruptive political force ever seen in this country.”

That British nightmare is now unfolding.

The Australian Housing Crisis

There have been repeated insurgencies by pro-republican, pro-American forces in Australia, ever since its first settlement in 1788, but the country remains today as much a British colony as ever. It is dominated by British finance and British corporations, assisted by their local compradors. That imperial structure has now spawned an epidemic of housing foreclosures even more severe than in the United States.

A February study by JP Morgan Fujitsu consultants found that 300,000 “severely mortgage-stressed” Australian families faced foreclosure within the year. Only weeks later, the firm updated its estimate to warn that 300,000 families could be on the streets within six months—this in a nation of only 21 million people! One hundred thousand Australians are homeless, reported Australia’s Welfare 2007 already a year ago, and over 1,000 families are losing their homes every week. Australian homeowners have a debt-to-income ratio of 175%, topping even the U.S.A.’s 130%, while the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey cites Australia as the least affordable nation for housing in the world, given that Australian families spend 6.1 times their annual income for housing (3.6 times in the U.S.). Repossession writs are skyrocketing in and around Sydney, the nation’s largest city, and across the continent in Perth, the capital of the “mining boom” state of Western Australia, 10,000 are homeless every night, amid heart-wrenching stories of poverty and hopeless conditions for children, elderly, and those with severe health problems. A feature in The Weekend Australian magazine of March 22 summarized the situation: “There is a sad, silent epidemic of poverty sweeping through Perth and it is happening on a frightening scale.” And, if anything, the crisis is often worse in rural Australia, ravaged by free trade and government refusal to build water infrastructure in this drought-ridden continent.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has shown only indifference or cynicism. “Australians should resign themselves to the fact that housing will never be affordable”, proclaimed the Reserve Bank’s recent housing report, as summarized in the April 2 Herald Sun, while a Treasury official acknowledged that, even though the housing crisis is “the worst on record” and 750,000 homeowners will be under mortgage stress in coming months by paying over 35% of their income for housing, they are “not necessarily struggling.” Rudd’s pathetic, corporativist solution to the problem is to hand out government subsidies to the private sector to build a measly 50,000 houses over five years (later expanded to 100,000 but over ten years), with only 3,500 in the first year.

Enter LaRouche’s HBPA

Into this disaster strode LaRouche’s associates in the LYM and the CEC in early January, when they launched a campaign to contact the nation’s 6,500 local councillors in all of its 600 councils. To date, some 4000 councillors have been contacted and 270 have endorsed the CEC/LYM resolution demanding that the federal parliament implement LaRouche’s HBPA immediately. (The HBPA is known as the HBPB in Australia, the final initial reflecting the fact that legislation is called a “bill” until parliament passes it as an “act”.) Six councils have formally endorsed the resolution and 100 more are debating it.

The LYM has spearheaded the drive, making presentations to council meetings and in countless individual meetings and discussions. Following one presentation, the council’s CEO wrote to the LYM, “On behalf of Council, I take this opportunity to thank you for your deputation on Monday February 4, 2008. Council was impressed with your presentation and resolved to ‘…support the Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill of 2008, as initiated by economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr to enact emergency legislation to keep people in their homes and avert social chaos.’ To this effect, I enclose a copy of Council’s resolution and wish you and your colleagues every success in progressing the issue further through the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia”.

Local media are beginning to cover the campaign as well. The Latrobe Valley Express outside Melbourne, for instance, reported the Latrobe City Council’s passage of the HBPB resolution under the headline, “Call for Mortgage Freeze”. The CEC escalated the campaign on April 14 by releasing 500,000 copies of its newspaper, the New Citizen, under the banner, “Only LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill Can Save Australia!” The paper features the legislation, a list of the councillors who have signed, and maps which depict the action (or inaction) taken by local councils in every state, accompanied by marching orders to pressure local councils and state and federal MPs; to circulate the New Citizen; and to contact local media about the HBPB. The paper also carries an “HBPA map” of the U.S., to emphasize the international nature of the fight.

The British Onslaught Against Local Government

The LYM/CEC chose to organize a wildfire at the level of government that is closest to the population, the local councils, because the federal and state governments are generally house pets of the financial oligarchy. That local organizing uncovered yet another London-centered fascist onslaught on Australia: the councils are being wiped out through amalgamation and their financial and physical assets are being looted, all under the rubric of “competition policy”—the Australian name for the London-directed corporatization and privatization of government at every level. The 600 local councils control an estimated $200 billion in physical assets; have an annual revenue of $23 billion (of which they spend about $20 billion, over 2% of GDP); and have liquid cash or investments of $11-12 billion. They employ some 165,000 people, and are responsible for maintaining 80% of all roads in the country, among much other infrastructure.

The privatization and “microeconomic reforms,” now amalgamating and crushing the Australian councils, were perfected in Britain, particularly under Prime Minister Margaret “Mad Cow” Thatcher (1979-90). They were then inflicted worldwide, particularly on British colonies, as noted by a recent Australian study on local government: “In the U.K., which was to become the intellectual inspiration for amalgamation movements in Australia and New Zealand, over 1300 local authorities were reduced to about 400 in the mid-1970s.” The next stop was New Zealand, where most national assets were sold off and the number of local government units was slashed from 741 to only 87, from 1988 through the early 1990s.

Under “competition policy,” such wholesale looting began in Australia in 1992, when ALP Prime Minister Paul Keating set up the three-person “Hilmer Review,” named for a union-busting specialist from Britain’s Rio Tinto, Fred Hilmer, who chaired it. That review produced the Competition Policy Reform Act 1995, which subjected the Australian economy to dictatorial control under two new institutions: the National Competition Council (NCC) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Hilmer’s position gives away the fact that the entire “competition policy” swindle was a project of its chief beneficiary, Macquarie Bank—founded in 1969 as the Australian subsidiary of Britain’s imperial Hill Samuel Bank, and now infamous as the world’s biggest orchestrator of PPPs. Besides his Rio Tinto post, Hilmer was a director of Macquarie (1989-1995), during the time he was conducting the “Hilmer Review.” Sitting as president of, first, the NCC and then, to this day, of the ACCC, is one Graeme Samuel, a long-time executive of Hill Samuel Australia, before and after it was renamed Macquarie.

The <>ICompetition Principles Agreement 1995 between the Federal and State governments outrageously proclaimed that “The principles set out in this Agreement will apply to local government, even though local governments are not Parties to this Agreement.” (emphasis added) British-owned flunkies in state government then corporatized and sold off tens of billions of dollars of publicly-owned state infrastructure, while also slashing local government, usually through the “council amalgamation” process. In South Australia the local councils dropped from 119 to 69 between 1993 and 1997; in Tasmania from 46 to 29; in Queensland from 157 to 73, as of that state’s March 15 elections; and in the Northern Territory from 62 to only 16 as of July 1, 2008.

Typically, the state government-run “local government advisory boards”—which were set up in the first place to oversee amalgamation— commission a study which will invariably conclude that many, even most of the state’s councils are “financially unsustainable,” and therefore should be amalgamated. Many councils do indeed have financial problems: free trade and competition policy have devastated the national economy and collapsed the local tax base, even as the federal and state governments have systematically cut back their grants in recent years, a significant source of local council revenue. Rural councils are particularly hard-hit, with even the present meager water supplies being privatized or just confiscated for “environmental flows.” As a founder of the Cairns Group of countries pushing free trade in agriculture, Australia has wrecked its own agriculture in order to show the rest of the world how it is done.

Another source of “financial unsustainability” is competition policy’s demands that councils hold billions of dollars in tax revenues as liquid financial assets, rather than spending them on urgently needed water, roads and other infrastructure, of which there is an estimated $13.5 billion deficit. Thus, the councils have been forced to plough these liquid assets, now at $11-12 billion, into the speculative bubble instead. The councils’ chief investment adviser has been Lehman Brothers Australia, the subsidiary of the New York Lehman Brothers whose senior official is the fascist/corporativist and bitter enemy of LaRouche, Felix Rohatyn. At least $400 million of those investments in New South Wales alone have vaporized in the so-called “subprime crisis,” and several councils are suing Lehman with many others considering court action.

LaRouche’s associates have exposed this London-centered looting in their HBPB organizing, featuring it in the half-million newspapers now hitting the country, in press releases, and on the CEC website (www.cecaust.com.au). Since July 1, 2007, the CEC has printed a total of 2 million New Citizens, which have featured LaRouche’s webcasts and related strategic material.

Predictably, all of this has enraged the British and their flunkeys.

Her Majesty’s Privy Council: “Ban LaRouche!”

Since the LaRouche movement first established a national headquarters in Melbourne in 1992, the Anti-Defamation Commission of B’nai B’rith (ADC) has repeatedly tried to drive LaRouche out of Australia. The ADC is a mere front for Queen Elizabeth II’s Privy Council, featuring among its eight-member board, three privy councillors. Now, the ADC has launched a new effort through New South Wales ALP Premier Morris Iemma’s brand-new crusade for fascist “electoral reform,” which will ban all private donations to political parties. Its clear target is the only significant independent political force in the country, the CEC and LYM. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s ALP government is also now preparing a major “Green Paper” on “electoral reform”, for which ALP national secretary Tim Gartrell says the party is “studying the NSW reform process.”

The Rupert Murdoch media empire and the Greens party are also championing Iemma’s scheme, whereby parties will receive public funding based upon the percentage of votes they received in the last election. But such votes are largely determined by the privately controlled mass media dominated by Murdoch, which determine who is “newsworthy” or “credible”, and thus largely shape the outcome of elections. Under this tyranny no new political force could ever emerge in Australia, nor could the entirely privately funded, LaRouche-associated CEC continue to survive.

Iemma owes his rise to his mentor Neville Wran, Premier of NSW from 1976-86, federal ALP president from 1980-86, and, most notably, a board member of the ADC. Among his other hats, Wran is also the Founding Patron of the Urban Taskforce, which “represents Australia’s most prominent property developers and equity financiers” and champions Iemma’s “blanket ban” on any non-public funding.

Already back in 2001-2002, Wran’s man Iemma joined an ADC drive to de-register the CEC as a party, as the ADC demanded in a formal submission to the federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in October 2002. Then pioneering public-private partnerships as NSW’s Minister for Public Works and Services, Iemma testified against LaRouche and the CEC to the state parliament, citing the ADC as the authorities on the matter and spouting their line: “LaRouche, who has served a prison sentence for fraud, is a well-known conspiracy theorist who espouses economic theories. For instance, he claims to believe Queen Elizabeth is involved in drug trafficking, Henry Kissinger is a British intelligence agent and the United States should colonise Mars. While we may not have credible information regarding a firm Ku Klux Klan presence here, the LaRouche organisation is both real and active around Australia.”

Like all ADC stooges, he, too, complained about the CEC’s fundraising: “For instance, in the 1999-2000 financial year … the LaRouche-affiliated organisation, the Citizens Electoral Council, raised nearly $1.5 million. That is more than the $996,000 raised by the Australian Democrats”, regarded at the time as the nation’s 3^rd or 4^th major party.

But Iemma’s intimacy with the ADC is not his only British connection: just down the street from his own office in Sydney is the headquarters of Macquarie Bank, the British Empire-spawned PPP and “competition policy” specialist. Macquarie has looted its home base of Australia more than anywhere else, and the city of Sydney most of all, through its network of outrageously priced toll roads which criss-cross the city. Now, Iemma has announced that he will not only privatize NSW’s state electricity sector for $15 billion—in blatant violation of the ALP’s own charter—but that he is doing so in order to extend the M4 Motorway, which just happens to be owned by Macquarie. It is unclear what role Iemma’s own longtime associate Bob Carr, a fanatical privatizer and his predecessor as NSW Premier, might be playing in the matter, now that he is a $500,000 per year “consultant” for Macquarie. The bank has a habit of buying up former government officials or their relatives for fantastic salaries, including Ann Keating, the sister of the man who launched “competition policy”, former PM Paul Keating, now chairman of a subsidiary of the arch-privatizer Lazard Frères bank and helping to spearhead the drive to privatize NSW’s electricity industry.

The Strategic Setting

LaRouche has emphasized that global strategic matters of today can only be comprehended by situating them in the emergence of the British East India Company-ruled British empire, consolidated through the 1756-63 Seven Years’ War, aptly termed by Winston Churchill “the First World War,” fought as it was all over Europe, in North America and in Asia (primarily against the French). Australia itself was founded as a direct consequence of that war and its aftermath, which included the American colonies’ successful revolution against the increasing British tyranny after 1763.

To further consolidate their hold in Asia, and to protect those Asian interests against ongoing challenges during 1784-86 from the Dutch, the Spanish and the French (all of whom had aided the Americans), Lord Shelburne, the head of the “Venetian Party” in Britain and the chairman of the three-man “Secret Committee” which ruled the British East India Company, ordered the founding of a military colony in Australia, then populated only by Aborigines. That colony was to forestall any other European power settling what was then known as “New Holland”; it was also to help protect the flanks of India, where British looting had unleashed mass death, and the sea route from there to China, so that Indian-grown opium could be forced upon the Chinese, for tea, and to extract the hoard of silver which China had accumulated over centuries.

The British shipped out boatloads of convicts to establish this base near what is today Sydney, and many of those were republican political prisoners inspired by the American Revolution, in a Britain where Tom Paine’s Rights of Man had sold an astounding one million copies. Putting aside for a moment the horrific British oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal population, from 1788 until today a kind of civil war has been fought by the European “native colonists”, so to speak—many of whom are descended from those republicans and the more than 150,000 prisoners shipped there up until 1850—against the British and their colonial lackeys. Such republican upsurges included the organizing by Australia’s greatest 19^th Century leader, the American-affiliated John Dunmore Lang, for a “United States of Australia”; the establishment of a national bank and transcontinental railroad by American immigrant King O’Malley, who called himself the “Alexander Hamilton of Australia”, as part of the spread of the American System into the Pacific following President Abraham Lincoln’s defeat of the British-sponsored Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War; and Prime Minister John Curtin’s stunning December 27, 1941 announcement that Australia would break with the British and henceforth “look to America,” a proclamation cemented by his alliance with the Australia-based U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and with President Franklin Roosevelt, who had intended to visit Australia after the war. Under conditions of today’s severe crisis, and because they represent that deep-rooted “American” current in Australia, LaRouche’s associates pose a real threat both to the British Empire’s looting of the country, but also to its intention of using it as a base to loot and destabilize Asia, as British officials have recently all but announced.

For instance, a January 30 Herald Sun article, headlined “UK eyes new role in Asia,” reported that “Britain will relaunch itself as a power in Asia with the help of its former colony, Australia, under its biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the balance of power in world order had shifted from West to East, placing nations such as China, India and even Australia at the forefront of global influence.” Wary of publicly betraying Britain’s real schemes, Miliband “stressed it was not about trying to recreate the British Empire of the 19^th Century”; but, the article concluded, “It is a grand departure for the UK, which in the past has been Euro-centric, with the former Blair government declaring just a single outside ‘bridge’ to the U.S. The policy shift will see more resources poured into Asia…”

Then, British Trade and Investment Minister Lord Digby Jones, on a mid-April visit to New Zealand and Australia, let slip the British strategic goal of destroying the United States, and of dominating Asia. “The 19^th Century belonged to my country, and the 20^th Century belonged to America. The 21^st Century belongs to Asia,” he proclaimed, even as he boasted that London is the “world financial capital.” He called for Britain to be a major part of Australia’s “drive into Asia … Britain is fortunate to have a former colony working so successfully with Asian businesses,” he gloated to The Age of April 3.

The idea that Australia should be the British Empire’s stepping stone for Asia and the Pacific was prominently touted in a 1995 Royal Institute of International Affairs report, “Economic Opportunities for Britain and the Commonwealth,” which emphasized that the old links of the British Empire still exist, and that Australia should become even more of a corporate and financial center for Britain in Asia than it was already. The report chronicled the astounding British foreign investment in Australia and that hundreds of British corporations were already using Australia as their Asian headquarters.

Since he took office in December 2007, the Fabian Society-owned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been hyperactive promoting British imperial schemes. An intimate of Al Gore, his first official act was to endorse the malthusian “Kyoto Pact” on global warming, which he is also demanding that India and China implement. He then visited Afghanistan and Iraq just before Christmas and expressed full Australian support for indefinite war in both countries—“the long haul”. His foreign minister Stephen Smith has pronounced that President Robert Mugabe “tried to steal” the recent election in Zimbabwe, and that Mugabe should be overthrown. In early April in Brussels, even as a free-trade engendered food crisis was sweeping the globe, Rudd called for slashing “subsidies and protection” for agriculture by two-thirds or more, as per British genocidal plans documented by Executive Intelligence Review magazine. In mid-April Rudd met with top Chinese officials in Beijing, on behalf of Macquarie Bank’s plans to expand into China, among other things as an investment advisor to China’s three main sovereign wealth funds, which are expected to total $729 billion by 2010, and one of which is the China-Africa development firm. In his recent world tour, Rudd met with Bush, Cheney, Queen Elizabeth II, and French President Sarkozy, and became the first Australian Prime Minister to ever attend a NATO meeting. And, reversing the ALP’s longstanding antipathy to Australian involvement in (British-orchestrated) U.S. missile defense schemes, he has now offered Australian facilities for such systems, which are clearly aimed at China and Russia.