Category Archives: Economics

Australia, Culture, Economics, Law, Political, radicalism

Ever heard of ESG?

David Penberthy Herald Sun February 24, 2024

As another millionaire CEO loses his job over another PR disaster, maybe it’s time sanctimonious corporations resorted to honesty. There was an interview in last month’s Qantas inflight magazine with the chief executive of the mining giant Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto you will recall is the company which landed itself in deep strife when it emerged in 2020 that it had blown up two 46,000 year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia to access $135 million worth of iron ore.

The revelation was pivotal in the departure of former CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques and his replacement with new boss Jakob Stausholm, the subject of the profile piece in the Qantas mag.

In that article, Stausholm talked about how he has always placed himself at the vanguard of what’s known in business circles as ESG, which stands for environmental, social, governance. ESG is basically the progressive corporate checklist covering everything from carbon emissions and reconciliation to gender equality and LGBTQI friendliness, against which “enlightened” modern corporations assess their conduct as good corporate citizens.

ESG strikes a delicate and often unsuccessful balance between doing the right thing, and coming across as preachy and sanctimonious.

It creates a real risk that companies can be seen as straying from their day jobs.

And it can also set them up for accusations of hypocrisy, as was the case last year when Rio Tinto took time out from its once-hectic schedule blowing up indigenous sacred sites to campaign for a Yes vote at last year’s referendum.

Continue reading Ever heard of ESG? →
Economics, History, Law, Racism, radicalism

George Floyd and BLM – all based on lies

From here in Melbourne, watching the reports of the George Floyd incident, I thought, as I have often done, here we go again.

What I saw on the bare images were policemen doing their job against a man who was resisting arrest. Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s lower neck, as it appeared from the angle of the video. It looked like a routine police manoeuvre. I clearly heard Floyd say, ‘I can’t breathe.’ If he couldn’t breathe, how could he say so distinctly, ‘I can’t breathe?’

As expected, people in high office paraded through the media, deploring the racist action of the police. As expected, people in low office – indeed, the lowest offices – took the cue and Minneapolis descended into chaos. Anarchy reigned for more than a week. George Floyd turned into a cause that flashed across the world.

But it was all based on lies.

The outstanding film below offers the proof. It also offers proof that the highest offices in western society – not just America – are filled by corrupt people, many of whom are determined to destroy everything the west has built up over the centuries. The film is on the video platform Rumble.

Australia, Economics, radicalism

Who will pay to support the return to the stone age?

Nuclear tests, missionaries displaced the Spinifex people. Now they’re back and relearning from the elders

Landline / By Emily JB Smith and Giulia Bertoglio, ABC, 13 March 2023

The sun sits low on the horizon as Maureen Donnegan searches the cool outback sand.  

She bends near a scrubby bush, lifts one end of a stick and kicks down on its middle, snapping it in two.  

A creature – creamy yellow and wriggling – spills onto the ground of Australia’s largest desert.

Ms Donnegan grins, triumphant.

Her friend Shona Jamieson plucks the squirming lump from the dirt and sets it over the coals of a small campfire, before cupping it in her hands and blowing gently.

“It’s got protein in it,” Mrs Jamieson says.

“Really healthy.”

Three photos show Maureen Donnagan snapping a stick and finding the yellow grubs
Maureen Donnegan finds maku in the Great Victoria Desert. (ABC Esperance: Emily Smith)

Read the rest here …

Conservatism, Culture, Economics, History

THE PLACE OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS IN EDMUND BURKE’S POLITICAL ORDER

Professor C.B. MacPherson in his short book Burke raised what he thought was a inconsistency between Edmund Burke’s political philosophy and his ideas on economics. Joseph Pappin III takes up the challenge in this paper and provides a convincing case on how the two can be reconciled in the natural law. Joseph Pappin’s book The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke is the only book devoted to the subject (metaphysics). Highly recommended.

THE PLACE OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS IN EDMUND BURKE’S POLITICS OF ORDER
The Austrian Scholars Conference, March 2002
By Joseph Pappin III, University of South Carolina
President of The Edmund Burke Society of America

I wish to focus upon what until now has been a largely unanswered question: “What is the relationship between Burke’s economic theory and his political theory?” The implications of this question and the built-in assumptions are that Burke’s political economy is entirely libertarian, stressing laissez-faire principles in a free-market setting, and that his political philosophy emphasizes order, hierarchy, tradition – all of which comprise a conservative world-view, recalcitrant towards change, prizing order and virtue over economic liberalism.

It is primarily due to the path-clearing works of Peter Stanlis on Edmund Burke and the Natural Law and Francis Canavan’s The Political Reason of Edmund Burke that the true principles of Burke’s politics were salvaged from the invariant and unyielding “Utilitarian” interpretation purveyed among virtually all Burkean expositors. The natural law foundations of Burke’s politics were retrieved from his Works in which they lay in clear light, and the natural moral law is grounded in the eternal law of God, as Burke maintains.  For Burke man is a creature of God “who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue,” and thereby “impressed an invariable law upon it.” (Tract on the Popery Laws)   But for commentators such as the English Marxist C.B. MacPherson, who claims to advance us beyond the natural law versus liberal utilitarian interpretations, both views lie incomplete: “Both fail,” MacPherson laments in his small volume Burke, “to resolve, indeed largely fail to see, the seeming incoherence between Burke the traditionalist and Burke the bourgeois liberal.” (Burke, Oxford, 1980, p.4). Here, Burke is seen to employ the language of “Natural Law” as a rhetorical device to sanction a tradition based, hierarchical society, which is already being transformed into a free market, capitalist economy. For Burke, “Utility and Natural Law were the same because capitalism and the traditional order were the same,” claims MacPherson, “because capitalism needed the sanction of tradition and habit.” The result: Burke is a bourgeois political economist who grounds the economy – and here is a dose of traditionalism coming through – not on contract but on status. And thus the rhetoric of “Christian Natural Law” is utilized to justify Burke’s own brand of economic reductionism.

Continue reading THE PLACE OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS IN EDMUND BURKE’S POLITICAL ORDER →
Culture, Economics, One World Government, radicalism

What is the new Normal?

Below is a commentary on a documentary, The New Normal, produced by the happen.network. A link to the documentary is in the commentary on the Mercola website. The ‘New Normal’ is about the ‘Great Reset’ proposed by The World Economic Forum (WEF), whose frightening detail has been exposed during this last year. The intentions of the Great Resent and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are not the fruit of some wacky right-wing conspiracy theory – the usual way the left deals with the exposition of their subversion and sabotage – but public outpourings of the fanatics and Dr Strangelove types that make up the cabal of the WEF. This is scary stuff. Read it. Acquaint yourself with a real Dr Strangelove.

*****

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • “The New Normal” documentary by Happen.network investigates speculation that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned — or at least is being exploited — by a group of tech elite who are dictating policy to governments globally in order to push a totalitarian agenda
  • At the root of the agenda is a significant economic and power shift that only a minority of people are aware of, being driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution
  • The World Economic Forum stated that 50% of all employees will require reskilling by 2025, “as the ‘double-disruption’ of the economic impacts of the pandemic and increasing automation transforming jobs takes hold”
  • AI is predicted to merge with humans and take over jobs and cities; AI will be so much better at driving than people, the documentary explains, that eventually most people will be afraid to drive; soon after that, humans won’t be allowed to drive at all
  • Data colonialism and digital dictatorship are very real possibilities in the “new normal,” as is the division of the world into wealthy elites and a “useless class,” which ends up as an exploited data colony.

“The New Normal” documentary by Happen.network investigates speculation that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned — or at least is being exploited — by a group of tech elite who are dictating policy to governments globally in order to push a totalitarian agenda.

There are many moving parts involved, from bad data that are inflating COVID-19 mortality rates to problems with PCR tests that are leading to very high false positive rates. A falsely inflated death rate drives more fear among the population, while a misleadingly high number of cases can be used as justification for more business closures and lockdowns.

All of this serves to further the ultimate agenda to “build back better” and “reset” the world to a “new normal.” At the root of the agenda, however, is a significant economic and power shift that only a minority of people are aware of, being driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Read the rest here…

Catholic Church, Christianity, Culture, Economics, Law, Media, radicalism

The Pope and ‘inclusive capitalism’

The Great Reset, the Vatican, and “Inclusive Capitalism”

Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch, Dec 15, 2020

What do the Pope and the Great Reset have to do with each other?

The papacy has been around for a long time – many centuries. The Great Reset, which I have discussed a lot of late, has also been around – at least for some decades. And a thing called “Inclusive Capitalism” has also been around for a few decades. What happens when you put all three together?

But let me say something at the outset: I am not picking on Catholics. Anyone who knows me realises I have always sought to avoid sectarian warfare. I have Catholic friends and Protestant friends. Some of my hardcore and very devout Catholic friends fully share with me concerns about the current Pope. He has been all over the place, and is far too often pushing various leftist agendas. One of my very committed Catholic friends recently told me she thinks Francis “is a heretic”!

Here I want to focus on a rather alarming website in which the Vatican is fully in bed with a rather worrying agenda. It is called “Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican”. Someone alerted me to it recently, and after just seconds into it, I was thinking to myself, “Wow, this sounds just like the Great Reset!” And a few seconds later I found that the site was linking to the main Great Reset organisation, the World Economic Forum. See here: www.inclusivecapitalism.com/

Read the rest here…

Conservatism, Culture, Economics, Politics

Three legs of American conservatism

This is a timely essay that puts neoconservatism in its true colours.

Nikki Haley Is No Conservative

AUSTIN RUSE

We like to say that American conservatism is a three-legged stool. The “legs” are the three dominant factions in the Republican Party: social traditionalists, economic libertarians, and foreign policy interventionists. Conventional wisdom holds that the Right is only stable if all three legs are balanced. Yet, over the last half-century, the only “leg” that has consistently gotten its way from the GOP are the war hawks.

Sure, economic conservatives have gotten lower taxes, but the federal register of encumbering regulations has grown exponentially. The red-headed stepchildren of the fusion coalition have been the social conservatives. What we have seen is our issues given short shrift and sacrificed pretty quickly in the light of foreign policy contingencies. (See George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.) All our issues went down the drain when the neoconservatives began braying for nation-building down a gun barrel.

Conventional Republican presidents have done three things. First, they defunded Mexico City Policy that prohibits American family-planning money from supporting abortion overseas. Second, they defunded the United Nations Population Fund. Thirdly, they promised strict constructionists on the Supreme Court. If they do these things, they are considered pro-life. And they have not tended to do much more than this.

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Culture, Economics, Philosophy, Political, Politics, radicalism, Religion

Life Cycle of a nation – Is the warning too late?

How to Avoid the Life Cycle and Death Spiral of a Republic

A wise Jerusalem is better than an innocent Eden.

By Garrett Ward Sheldon • August 7, 2020

To understand the extraordinary events in America today, it is helpful to look at the ancient wisdom of Greece and Rome. And as the wise historian Thucydides said, “If we forget the errors of the past, we are doomed to repeat them.” The classical Greek authors Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as the Romans Cicero and St. Augustine, explain much of what we are experiencing in politics today. A certain textbook, The History of Political Theory: Ancient Greece to Modern America, may also be helpful in this endeavor.

The ancient Greco-Roman historian Polybius (200-118 B.C.) developed a theory of the “lifecycle” of a republic. Like a human being, a republic is born, is young, matures, grows old, and dies. The United States was born in 1776 (our Declaration of Independence) and 1789 (the ratification of our Constitution); was a youth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; you might say was adolescent in the mid-1800’s (during our Civil War) and matured in the industrial age of late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, by the mid-20th century, especially after World War II, our country grew old, and beginning in the 1960s, frail, sickly, and mentally-impaired.

Like human beings, elderly republics become weak and sickly, sad and demented before they die completely: into anarchy and lawlessness, or tyranny and dictatorship. A society shows its old age in moral weakness, political corruption, decadence, and depravity. 

Read on…

Australia, Economics, Left, radicalism

The other side of the CoviD-19 narrative

The appearance of the Corona virus has achieved what all the machinations of Western Marxists have failed to achieve since the Russian Revolution: lock people in their homes and deal what could be a fatal blow to the market economies of the West – otherwise called Capitalism.

The pretext is the COVID-19 virus. The only way to deal with this highly infectious virus is to restrict people to their homes and shut down most economic activity while printing money to ‘save’ businesses from destruction.

Christopher Ferrara in a long essay in Remnant newspaper, DONALD TRUMP and the COVID19 PANIC: A Comprehensive Analysis, discusses the other side of the story. The other side is President Trump’s strategy to deal with the virus whose effects on the evidence is hardly more serious that seasonal influenza. This is a long essay but it’s worth reading, if for nothing else than to read an alternative narrative to the present program of destruction – and the handing over of Western Society to the extreme Marxist left some of whom are already gloating over the irony of it all.