What planet are you on, Mr Rudd?

What planet are you on, Mr Rudd?

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd cut off a question from the CEC’s Queensland State Secretary Jan Pukallus at last night’s Community Cabinet meeting in Beenleigh, Qld, to blurt, “in response to any question which is about Lyndon LaRouche, I regard Mr LaRouche as right off the planet!” (Click here to listen to the exchange.)

Mrs Pukallus was responding to Rudd’s opening remarks that his government relies on the best economic intelligence they can get to make decisions, by challenging the Prime Minister to listen to Lyndon LaRouche, who accurately forecast the global financial crash.

So, if Lyndon LaRouche, who did accurately forecast the crisis that Rudd and his cronies insist nobody could have foreseen, is “off the planet”, what planet is Kevin Rudd on?

Rudd’s message at last night’s meeting was Australia is the best economy in the world, our banks are the strongest in the world, our unemployment is among the lowest in the world, our property market is the strongest in the world, “but we’re not out of the woods.”

The reality is:

• Australia’s banks have a $14 trillion exposure to the $1.4 quadrillion global derivatives bubble, and have been on government life support for two years, from the Reserve Bank, the Future Fund, the $2 trillion unbackable deposit guarantee, the foreign liabilities guarantee, and various schemes like the tripled first homeowners grant, which has driven up house prices and made them more unaffordable for new homebuyers, but has been a boon to sellers and lenders, with the banks often being both. Despite that life support, Australia’s big four banks have a combined provision for bad and doubtful debts of $14 billion, forecast to go as high as $50 billion in the next three years, which increases with each new revelation of their heavy exposure to every new financial scandal that emerges, often via insane margin lending à la Storm Financial, so it is only a matter of time before one or more of the banks bite the dust.

• The enormous resources which Australia’s governments have committed to propping up the banks, have sapped their budgets, and triggered various austerity measures, including Anna Bligh’s thieving privatisation spree planned for Queensland, and Rudd’s ominous Obama-style health care reforms, described by Health Minister Nicola Roxon as a necessary “difficult conversation”, which will slash more resources from our already stripped-bare public health system.

• Australia’s unemployment figures are a fraud, deliberately manipulated through statistical tricks, including counting people who work for one hour per week as employed, to downplay the jobs crisis which has become a permanent feature of the Australian economy since Hawke and Keating crushed our manufacturing and agricultural base with free trade. Unemployment and underemployment is a huge crisis, and because we’ve lost our strong manufacturing and agricultural industrial base, we’ve become a “services” economy totally exposed to, and dependent upon, the global economy buying our resources—a global economy officially forecast to contract by 3 per cent this year, the first such collapse since official records have been kept.

Lyndon LaRouche is leading a worldwide fight, which includes the CEC, to force government to address the global economic crisis, in a way that puts the welfare of the people, not the banks, first. Unless Kevin Rudd comes clean and acknowledges the actual crisis, and acts on it, we’re certainly not on the same planet as him.

ENDS