Australia Day: a date that divides us
As Australia Day 2016 approaches, I feel, once again, a sense of discomfort, something I attribute to my uneasiness about what this day represents.
I have long felt uncomfortable about using the 26th January to commemorate the birth of our nation. After all, it was that day in 1788 an occupying force landed in Botany Bay, a force that sought no dialogue with the indigenous inhabitants nor cared for any.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
What would happen if a Sovereign Currency Issuing Government with a floating exchange rate ran a Fiscal Deficit without Borrowing?
There is no nexus that demonstrates that borrowing has anything to do with “financing” government net spending. Borrowing is a monetary operation aimed at interest-rate maintenance.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
We are governed by Idiots
After several interest rate reductions over the past two years, a tool used by the Reserve Bank to stimulate activity, not much has happened. Business has not been prompted to invest and consumer spending is flat. So one might well ask, what’s going on behind the scenes?
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
This Bernie Sanders’ Appointee Has Proposed an ELR- So Who is She and What is That?
An Employer of Last Resort, also known as a job guarantee, is exactly what it sounds like. It is a promise by the government through either through private partners in the community or through government institutions to provide a job to any worker who is able and willing to work but cannot find suitable (or any) employment in the private sector.
In December of 2014 Bernie Sanders appointed Stephanie Kelton to be the Chief Economist for the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.
Dr. Kelton is a Research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, the founder and editor in Chief of one of the world’s most prescient economics blogs New Economic Perspectives and an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas City Missouri. She is also one of the leading proponents of a federally funded ELR.
As one of the world’s most prominent…
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What is Neo-liberalism and why knowing matters.
I have said it before but it deserves repeating. Democracy is not failing us; it is we who fail democracy when we fail to actively engage with it. Democracy, as we practice it today, has lost its essential direction and has been usurped by a divisive creed full of vitriolic, jingoistic spin.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
The Game is Rigged.
A short video by Robert Reich lasting just 2 minutes 35 seconds landed in my news feed on Facebook a few days ago. For all I know it may have been around for months, but that’s irrelevant. The message is what is important.
Reich was US Secretary for Labor, from 1993-1997 under the presidency of Bill Clinton and besides now being Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkley, he is also an outspoken political commentator.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
Blogging for a Better Australia
What do the following have in common: Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Arthur Sinodinos, David Johnston, Bronwyn Bishop, Jamie Briggs, Eric Abetz, Mal Brough, Kevin Andrews, Bruce Billson?
They were all Liberal ministers in the Australian Abbott government, including Abbott himself, and all somehow fell out of favour with their peers or chose to resign from their portfolios and, in the process, weakened the government’s unity, it’s cohesion, it’s integrity….if indeed it had any in the first place.
Hello, my name is John Kelly and I am a blogger at ‘The View From My Garden.” I am 70 years of age, retired from paid work and loving it. My passion is Australian politics and Economics. I have a Bachelor of Communications degree majoring in Journalism.
I have no Economic qualifications but am a student of Professor Bill Mitchell, professor of Economics at Newcastle University in New South Wales, even though he probably doesn’t know it.
Professor Mitchell writes a blog every day on some issue of relevance to Australian politics and the state of our economy. His vast knowledge and foresight enables those who follow him to understand how money works. He does this better than any other economist save a handful of his associates, here and around the world, who are of like mind.
What you will discover reading my blogs is that I do not suffer fools. Perhaps I could be more conciliatory, but when one watches the antics of a federal government that acts like a bunch of illiterate, schoolyard bullies, patience and grace are not my first considerations.
So join me if you wish or don’t. I will still be here doing what I enjoy. As you will note, all my blogs are syndicated with The Australian Independent Media Network where the majority of my readership resides.
You are welcome to join us but don’t expect oranges and roses. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about exposing the incompetence of a dysfunctional government that includes the ten members listed above.
Ten ministerial replacements were thus required to replace them in the short space of two years and three months. This is no more than a political version of Game of Thrones. Doubtless there will be more exposed before they are removed from office.
John Kelly
Election 2016: Some Economic Myth-Busters
A Happy New Year to everyone and in case you have forgotten, 2016 is an election year. Regardless of one’s personal preference for a conservative or progressive victory in that election, there should be at least one more immediate concern.
Irrespective of our political preferences, we should all be informed and be informing of, to as many voters as possible that, in terms of the economy, much of what they will hear from both conservative and progressive candidates leading up to the election, will be false.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
Six Pillars of Wisdom
Have you picked up on the government’s latest three word slogan, “paid with savings” yet? Each new initiative announced recently, where money is involved, comes with the new mantra “paid with savings.”
The government has got the ever vexing question from the media covered. “How are you going to pay for it?” they ask. “Paid with savings,” they answer. How cute.
Read more at: The Australian Independent Media Network
John Kelly