OBAMA AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INDONESIA …
I watched live Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Indonesia today. It was brilliant. He recounted stories of his four years in Indonesia in the 1960s, making a deep connection with his audience when he touched on the extent of development and relative stability that’s occurred since the politically charged days he remembers as a child (in villages he’s still able to name).
His talk was liberally salted with Indonesian phrases. These were greeted with enthusiasm and applause, and he was able to draw comparisons between the USA’s unity as a nation, e pluribus unum, and Indonesia’s success in striving to unite a former colony of so many islands and disparate languages.
The things that draw humanity together we shouldn’t allow religious differences to divide, and Indonesia’s increasing tolerance and democracy sets an example to the world, he said. More controversially, he proposed that US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is all about helping to deliver democracy to those benighted countries.
The speech was one of his best.
As I watched him talk, I could already see how Obama’s enemies in the US will react. They’ll say he’s more interested in sucking up to Muslims than dealing with the sick economy back home. That wouldn’t be fair.
Nevertheless, having enjoyed his near perfect Indonesian address, I remain thunderstruck at how such articulate and bright people, leaders such as Barack Obama, David Cameron and Julia Gillard, are always economically ignorant. Always! None of them has the slightest clue about what makes economies tick.
… AND CITIGROUP EXPOSES THE ‘PLUTONOMY’
In connection with economic illiteracy, this incredible piece seeming to emanate from Citigroup is worthy of the read. Save it somewhere safely for the odd re-read when you want to get your head around how economies of the world really operate.
The subversive little paper demonstrates that far lesser individuals than presidents and prime ministers are quite capable of understanding how to keep economies working for the favoured few. It’s barbaric, Machiavellian, but true. It could almost have been written by Ralph Norris.
Whereas Obama and Cameron are surrounded by crooks and economic idiots, Gillard’s Ken Henry stacks up head and shoulders above the throng because he understands the enormous potential of publicly generated rents to replace damaging taxes.
Unfortunately, Henry’s flagged that he may have had enough and wants to retire next year. [sigh!] 🙁
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No your, right, I see your point, Perhaps their ‘Golden rule’ of PPP is much like that of Alistair Crowley of the Golden Dawn-: “Do what thou shall will, shall be the whole of the law”, whatever it takes, in other words.
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I agree. The trip was diplomatically aimed to ease interfaith and international tensions in the Muslim world’s most populous nation.
It was the Dutch, however, not the French, who colonised The Spice Islands (Indonesia). You may be confusing Indonesia the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, partly colonised by the French?
The point of my blog was simply to pose the question: How do otherwise quite intelligent people not accept that poverty, dispossession and international tensions result entirely from governments pandering to private interests by granting them the privilege of retaining unto themselves publicly-generated land and resource rents, instead of capturing them for revenue?
Maybe we avoid and remain quiet on the point because many of us have hopes that rent-seeking may get us ahead of the next person, and the devil take the hindmost? This doesn’t quite seem to square with the ‘golden rule’?
I thought it was the French who first went to Indonesia in colonial times, and thus DC has it’s Oriental lodge connection with France, of old, but I saw the trip as symbolic or home-coming as more a diplomatic trip to ease interfaith between Islam and West, some Christian right fringe in America would say it’s bad omen of the Democrats leader, other factions would say the Volcano eruption is a sign of end times, and others that it was more symbolic to appease the fiery Volcano spirit as the continent of a modern leader of the West’s, origins. As the biggest Muslim Nation, some aspects of Islam associate the Zionist “Scottish Rite Masons- headquartered in DC-the type practiced in DC sea’s itself as a neo-crusading order modelled on the Knights Templars” (pg 482 Talisman- Graham Hancock) Although the conspiracy that Zionists mason control world affairs, Masonry, Is as much a part of Islam having origins in Abraham the so called father of the three faiths was a practiced mason, Actually it was Akhenaten that was the great monotheist, not Abraham-see ‘The Copper scroll decoded” Of Islam linage prior kings of Masonry of ‘Zerubbabel lodge as their throne of Persia’ (Book of Hiram) As for the trip, it was not a pure economic trip, as behind every nation is a culture and religion that reaches deep into the psyche and collective conscious of it’s people. World history is the history of nations but at the core of each nation is a religion, – Religion coherence between faiths is as powerful force as economics, as Hegel said_: “Without the religious cult, no political life is possible”.