Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The New Statesman" channel.

  1. I'm Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship. You need to understand that the way history is taught to Americans is NOT LIKE how its taught in places like Europe or Australia. I studied history starting in Ancient Egypt & Mesopotamia. Then we did Greece and Rome and then covered 2000 years of British History finally getting to 200 years of Australian history. Americans are taught American history and that covers 2 periods - before the revolution and after the revolution. Their basic grasp of any other history is almost ZERO and its why they get into so much trouble at times.
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  2. I'm Australian and therefore fairly neutral on the whole mess. The person who I have found to make the most sense is Mark Blyth the Scottish political-economist who works at Brown U. in America. He was intialy against Brexit but did predict that the Leave vote would win. On one hand it was stupid because you literally threw away all the benefits on a set of false pretenses and got NOTHING back. Mark Blyth points out that London's banking sector was the clearing house for all Euro transactions with non-EU nations and now that income to the nation is gone and will NEVER come back. On the other hand the EU has a lot of economic issues because the French and Germans can't handle the concept that the rest of Europe doesn't necessarily work how they think it should work. Mark Blyth also points out that many of the smaller states are in serious economic trouble because without independent currencies that can't adjust their economies very easily. They are all kind of trapped by the European Central bank. Mark Blyth is now suggesting that its a POTENTIALLY a very good thing for Britain to get some distance from the issues that Europe faces and those things were coming irrespective of Ukraine erupting. Of all the things and players in this mess there is one person who I think needs a good old fashions hung, draw & quartering and that's Nigel Farage. As soon as Brexit went how he wanted he just simply resigned and dumped the whole thing on others. Irrespective of how anyone voted that's a 10,000% shite thing to do and it represents everything wrong with populists. One final point on setting up NEW trade agreements. Britain is not in a strong negotiating position with anyone. No matter who is in #10 they need to make deals and that means every negotiation starts with Britain as the beggar not the prince that it thinks it is. If Britain thinks Australia, New Zealand South Africa, India, Canada are all going to play the meek and humble colonials you better Wake TFU because we all remember how you dumped us in the 1970s when you joined the EU. That nearly bankrupted our entire Ag sector and it took over 20 years to recover. AND NONE OF US have simply forgotten any of the other things Britain did over the last 100+ years.
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  3. Brilliant comment. On your math query. I'm actually an American educated Australian aerospace engineer. When in America I was trained in what engineers call complex systems analysis. Its not taught to other engineers but we need to because at its core is considering the effects and consequences of design choices. So we do a lot of propose/consider "Change 'X' followed by "what are the effects of change-X on systems A, B, C, D... etc and what are the consequences of those effects on those systems. Listen to how he describes how that £600 Billion moved around until it ended up with the wealthy who then hoarded it. THAT'S SYSTEMS ANALYSIS and I rarely see it among economists. Either he has natural talent for complex systems or he's had some from of training that he has been able to apply to his field. He's not the first person I have seen, Mark Blyth the Scottish Political Economist does it too, but Gary is certainly the youngest I have seen do this.
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  4. He's one of the very very few millennials I have seen in the field of economics who has a grasp of reality. This is only the first time I have seen him and he's immediately impressed me. I'm actually an American educated Australian aerospace engineer. When in America I was trained in what engineers call complex systems analysis. Its not taught to other engineers but we need to because at its core is considering the effects and consequences of design choices. So we do a lot of propose/consider "Change 'X' followed by "what are the effects of change-X on systems A, B, C, D... etc and what are the consequences of those effects on those systems. Listen to how he describes how that £600 Billion moved around until it ended up with the wealthy who then hoarded it. THAT'S SYSTEMS ANALYSIS and I rarely see it among economists. Either he has natural talent for complex systems or he's had some from of training that he has been able to apply to his field. He's not the first person I have seen, Mark Blyth the Scottish Political Economist does it too, but Gary is certainly the youngest I have seen do this.
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  5. I'm Australian but went to college in America (U. Illinois) so I know both Wisconsin and Missouri. I used to have plenty of interesting discussions with friends on the US Constitution. I did engineering but a bunch of them we pre-law. My policy sci was mostly studying Orwell (AF & 1984) in high school. So I used to argue that any country or society could fall into a totalitarian nightmare because that was Orwell's warning - "Look after your country or it can turn into a nightmare." Their main argument (and they studied this stuff) was that it was impossible in America because the US Constitution was specifically written to prevent it through its system of "Checks & Balances" One thing that we never discussed because it was inconceivable was what would happen if somebody corrupted that system of checks & balances so that they could start undermining other parts of the US System. Look at what a small group of billionaires have done funding Mitch McConnell's corruption of the Senate. They now have a completely corporatized SCOTUS making judgements that suit what they want. My friends used to explain to me that SCOTUS would protect the Constitution from abuse. and that SCOTUS was impossible to corrupt because the Senate would provide the checks & balances. The House could pass new laws but the Senate would check what they wrote and make sure it was balanced. The president would make the necessary executive decisions if and when needed and the Senate would reign him in if he went to far. If you think I have misread what my college friends told me 30+ years ago (it was the late 80s) then tell me what they got wrong. A bunch of them are now lawyers and I can't wait to eventually make it to a Homecoming and ask them about this stuff and hear what they have to say now.
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  6. You're absolutely right but then where was the leadership when the same things happened among Catholics or Protestants. This sort of thing has been going on in one culture after another for centuries. There's a very ugly truth to the theme that all Asians look alike. When Genghis Kahn sacked cities he systematically killed every male and then raped every girl and after he raped them he had his sons rape them and then his men raped what was left. BUT THEN the Romans did similar, the Greeks did similar, the Vikings actually did the same, the British did similar. EVERY EMPIRE has done the same thing in various ways. We all think this is something new and dramatic. Think of the shock about Harvey Weinstein and yet Hollywood was rife with rumors for decades. We've always suspected the rich and powerful people do things and then get shocked when we find them actually doing those things. We've sadly tolerated certain behaviors for centuries and now claim we are shocked to find out they're bad.
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  7. I think you 100% right. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) an watched what has happened. I also worked in Canada for a few months back in pate 2017. We also get the British NHS explained out here. We have a dual system where we have both public and private systems running in parallel with a reasonable amount of overlap. It works for us I know that Britain and Canada have similar private systems running in parallel but I think they are smaller than our private sector (as a percentage of the overall). We have had people push for a fully privatised system in the past. None of of our politicians dare try now because we all look at America and tell them to FK-OFF. Its a sure fire way to lose an election and it can end a political career quicker than any sex scandal. The problem America has and I have said almost an identical thing on 2 other videos today on completely different subjects is that our public discussions these days get hijacked by tribalized clowns who just want to scream at everything. These tribalized clowns come in all sorts of colors depending on the subject. They all believe they are 101% right and they need to save the human race from the rest of us. I'm an engineer and I can tell you with assurity that if the tribalized clowns would just STFU and go away then we can get out of the energy crisis in a way that is both cost effective and doesn't kill the planet. It won't be quick and will take some time but its doable. We just can't get heard and that's just so typical at the moment.
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  8. I'm Australian so I am on the outside looking in on this. We went through a whole era where we dumped PM after PM. It was so bad at one stage the New Zealand PM publicly joked he'd like to call Australia to talk about Pacific issues but didn't know who was PM this week. Its bad enough when the All blacks belt us, let alone their smartass attitudes but that was a new low for us. Rishi Sunak wont call a general election because even though British Labor is a the joke that got smashed by Boris "the buffoon" Johnson when their strategy included hiring some of Hilary Clinton's team, he knows he'd get smashed right now. He's not stupid but then anyone wanting to be British PM right now either wants to do something specific or they're a fool.
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  9. We could be having the EXACT same discussion here in Australia. Its what I like about this channel they have RELEVANT discussions.
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  10. AUSTRALIAN HERE: Why is David Cameron getting a knighthood? Isn't he the clown he kicked off the whole Brexit disaster? In the past clowns like him who did that much damage didn't get a knighthood they got their heads chopped off.
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  11. As an Australian I find this almost hilarious and sad at the same time because we have found out that our Labour Party has the same basic attitude. We voted them in 18 months ago to FIX all the crap and nonsense our Conservatives had dumped on the nation for 9 years and so far they have done didley squat. The problem is they all went to the same universities and learned the same economics. They come at economic issues from slightly different perspectives but the solutions are the same: - Hire more consultants; - Tax cuts for the rich; - No changes to existing programs or introduction of new programs that might actually help; - Hand out exorbitant juicy contracts to corporations who donated to their campaign. SOUND FAMILIAR???
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  12. I'm an Australian engineer and just adding to the effects of Human Resources. Its been devastating to the engineering profession. Irrespective of what you do or don't like about engineers we built the modern world including its good and bad things. There is almost not a single thing in your life we don't have a hand in. Everything you have that has metal or plastic or if it went through a factory involved engineering. That includes all the obvious things but also many less obvious things. Almost all of the food consumed in the developed world involves engineering from the tractors, plows and harvesting equipment though the processing, packaging and delivery systems as wheel as the refrigerated storage you all rely on. Similarly almost all of your clothing involved engineering and that again starts in the paddock, goes through the factories that process fibre, weave cloth and then make your cloths you wear. TO BUILD the modern world you all take for granted INCLUDING the computer you are on RIGHT NOW has taken generations of SKILLs and EXPERIENCE and TO KEEP THAT WORKING also requires SKILLs and EXPERIENCE. So when HR arrived and threw away skills and experience for their psychological profiling that was aimed at weeding out anyone who might question management that emphasis on SKILLS and EXPERIENCE went out the door. It gave the world horrible cases like the Boeing Max-8. I did my degree in aerospace engineering. I'm also formally trained in backup safety systems like the MCAS system that flew those planes into the ground. That system broke so many basics it still staggers me anyone thought it was safe and YET all those engineers that HR claimed were the right people in the right place for the right reasons did what they did and all those people died. For decades Boeing (like other companies) had built up systems based on SKILLS and EXPERIENCE and they built damn good airplanes. For decades driving a car has been more dangerous than flying at speeds in excess of 800kmh at altitudes so high that if a person was exposed to the outside conditions they'd die in seconds. So if the great claim of HR is to "put the RIGHT people in the RIGHT place for the RIGHT reasons" then how did the Boeing Max-8 happen? Think about this question next time you get in the car or on a train or on a plane. Did the HR person who picked the engineers to build that car, train or plane have any idea what it takes to make SAFE cars, SAFE trains or SAFE planes or where they like the HR at Boeing?
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  13.  @robynhope219  Maybe not all of the population but certainly the vast majority. We always find it fun to see how many countries they can name on a map.
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  14. I'm Australian and all what they are saying is going on EVERYWHERE. We are living in an age where the whole "kick the can down the road" policy of government has finally arrived at the inevitable pile of cans. If you kick all the cans in the same direction it will eventually pile up. Go watch a few episodes of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister and you'll quickly see that the purpose of government is to hold the staus quo on everything until it becomes someone else's problem. All the stuff that hasn't been fixed or hasn't been done has finally come to a its inevitable conclusion. Anyone who actually tried to fix anything got screamed at or got swamped in committee meetings. Anyone who actually succeeds at getting things done is labelled a heretic.
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  15. I'm Australian and about 10 years older than you. You have perfectly described what myself and a generation have endured under what we now call neoliberal economics. I am about 10 years older than and by dates am supposedly of the boomer generation. But I HAVE NEVER identified with the boomers at all. I actually went to university in America and at that time we all called ourselves Gen-X. After graduating and getting back to Australia I landed right into the start of a recession that the Australian LABOR Treasurer Paul Keating described as "the recession that we needed to have." That recession absolutely crushed the majority of people who graduated from the late 80s to the late 90s. Even though the 2000s were great due to the mineral boom to feed the Chinese beast were great we'd LOST a decade of decent earnings that we have never recovered from. Keating was followed by the Liberal (our version of the Tories) Kevin Costello who was even worse because he crushed the entire manufacturing sector. Because like Keating he was a student of Thatcherism and Reaganomics he valued the services sector as the future. So we had 2 (one Left and one Right right wing) Treasurers in succession who were right out of the Blair, Cameron, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale mold espousing what we now call neoliberalism. AND RIGHT NOW both sides of Australian politics can't understand why we hate them. From what I know of what's happening in America - same thing.
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  16.  @dnyhan  This is only the first time I have heard him speak and I thought he had some form of systems analysis education in his background. So your comment doesn't surprise me. Its the fact he considers side effects and the consequences of those effects. Systems analysis actually started among the ICBM engineers but came to the fore during the Apollo program. The craziest thing is the industry that created it occasionally doesn't use it resulting in things like the Boeing Max-8.*The idea is SA is to solve the problem WITHOUT creating the next problem.* With the Max-8 they solved one problem only to create an even worse problem. If you consider what Gary is saying in this video its the same sort of negligence. And so you know we did similar here in Australia. Our government pulled $38 Billion out of thin air and just handed it out to Australian businesses during COVID. The average pay of executives of the ASX 200 (the top 200 companies on our stock exchange) reached a new record - $9.8million. That's just their basic pay NOT including bonuses and other allowances.
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  17. I'm Australian but went to college in America and I was there during one of the primary seasons and its way worse than you think. On this thing about the elites picking their candidates he's 1/2 right and 1/2 wrong. If you look at the Republicans its a mob inspired chaotic mess like he describes. Just think back to 2015 and Trump just standing their and insulting their wives. The GOP is now ruled by Oligarchs. HOWEVER if you look at the Democrats its the complete opposite. The Executive of the DNC based around the Clintons and Obamas have selected the last 3 candidates - Hilary, Biden & Kamala Harris AND THAT'S been a disaster. The DNC is now ruled by their corporate funded clowns. What all of the commentators are failing at, because they each have their side, is that BOTH SIDES of American politics is in a terrible state of SHlT candidates being promoted by vested (usually big money) interests. As one of the very few neutral commentators put it a few weeks ago the Corporations LOST to the Oligarchs. If there's a scary thing then we all need to consider how many of our own parties have been killing the careers of anyone capable and replacing them with puppets. I know this is TRUE in Australia and all signs say its TRUE in Britain.
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  18.  @malin5468  The things that aggravate me as an engineer isn't just that people with non-engineering backgrounds think they are technically literate because they took a couple of science classes and can use a computer but they think they're also qualified to make technical decisions on things like energy. My main motivation on informally studying economics was so I could find a way to speak their language back at them as a means to stop them hogging all the oxygen in every public discussion. Between the idiots on the Left and the maniacs on the Right the rest of us trapped in the middle really are in serious trouble. There's a whole raft of things BOTH side of politics have done over the last 40+ years that are now coming into this perfect storm of complete crap BECAUSE they never consider the consequences. I did my degree in aerospace and we're trained different to all others because our systems have such narrow margins of failure. We HAVE to be mindful of effects and consequences. If we don't then stupid stuff like the Boeing Max-8 happens where the computer that was supposed to prevent accidents flew the plane into the ground. The idea of consequences seems to be devoid in economics. I was just pointing out in another comment how economists with their "Greed is Good!" mantra is one of the main drivers of the migration crisis. There's a great doco on tax avoidance here on YT called "The Silent Killer of the Middle Class." About 35 minutes in they describe how bananas bought from Guatemala are traded via the Caymans before being sold in Europe. They do this huge mark up trick in the Caymans that avoids tax being paid. The Guatemalan farmers get squat so pay little tax. The traders in Europe don't make much so they pay little tax. They estimated that a country like Guatemala is NOT getting about $400 Million a year in tax revenue. Just imagine what some of those poorer countries could do with that sort of money if it was spent on infrastructure, schools and health care. Why would people migrate out of desperation when their country actually has a future? This same stuff goes on for all sorts of stuff our corporations pillage from poor countries. Because those countries get no tax revenue they get no chance to develop and as a result the people in those countries try and migrate to Europe, America, Canada, Australia,.... I am very concerned that if the economists don't back off then its going to get very nasty. If you haven't heard we have a series of major scandals here in Australia with the big consultancies (KPMG, PwC, EY & Deloitte). Most of those consultants are economists. They've cost about AU$20 Billion in fees and we've got so many giant piles of crap to deal with we don't know where to start.
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  19.  @malin5468  Explaining the Max-8 stall characteristics takes a bit so bear with. FIRST - I have a pilots license and an aerobatics endorsement and I have competed in competitive aerobatics. So I'm pretty familiar with stalls and spins. There was never an actual problem with the engines or the balance of the Max-8. It wasn't even a problem that it had a an abrupt stall characteristic many other planes also have abrupt stall characteristics. To make any plane have very low drag means the aerodynamics are generally fine tuned for level flight. As such there are many planes that you really don't want to ever stall. Like 1,00s of others I first learned to fly in Cessna 152s and 172s. The reason is simple they are super stable including a very benign stall. In fact you actually have to force a 152 or 172 to really stall and drop the nose. After the Cessnas I did my retractable undercarriage and constant speed prop endorsements in Mooney M20s, which is fabulous plane but also designed to be a low drag palne. The Mooney was designed with the aim of doing 200knots on 200hp which is not easy. HOWEVER to do that the Mooney has a very slippery full laminar flow wing that is brilliant in level flight but sucks if it stalls. AGAIN that's nothing odd and is characteristic of quite a few of the fast and slippery light aircraft are similar. But if you stall a Cessna you don't lose a massive amount of altitude. In fact if you recover well it might be as little as 50ft and if you really work hard and fully stall Cessna you can still recover in a few hundred feet. A Mooney however can lose 1,500feet in a stall and do it incredibly fast. Considering that the standard landing pattern is done at 1,000ft then its incredibly important to know and understand what a plane like the Mooney feels like as it gets close to stalling. AND YES I did a lot of that but up at safe altitudes. So please understand this. There never was anything wrong with the concept or design of the Max-8. Even the Airbuses and other similar planes like Learjets ALL HAVE nasty stall characteristics. Make no mistake no pilot ever wants to stall any of those planes, because they will drop their nose and try an punch a hole in the planet. The Max-8 was just a little worse than others so they decided that it needed more than just a set of alarms to tell the pilots to back-off. There's nothing odd about that either. The Max-8 was not the first plane with MCAS or similar override systems. Before I explain the problem you need to understand that in engineering redundancy means having backup. In basic terms a standard redundant system has 2 of something - 1 to do the job and 1 backup. A triple redundant system has 3 and can check them against each other. Its normal that in pilot assistance systems like MCAS they have redundancy. The MCAS problem was HOW & WHY IT WAS DONE. The WHY was to save money -> One of the issues with any new plane is pilot training. The competing Airbus had been done so well it was NOT considered an all new airplane and pilots didn't need extra training for it. It was regarded as an upgrade rather than new plane rather. that made it easy for airlines to buy. One of the genius sales monkeys at Boeing made a deal with one airline for 200 Max-8s. As part of that deal he made an agreement that if their pilots needed extra training then Boeing would reimburse them $1 million per plane or $200 million in total for that training. If Boeing had put in a fully redundant system then under FAA rules pilots would have needed extra training and on that one deal Boeing would have lost $200 million. THAT'S THE WHY. The HOW was by not installing a redundancy in the sensors. Unfortunately that meant if that one sensor faulted in the wrong way and said the aircraft was stalling it would push the nose down irrespective of what was actually happening. As part of the WHY above the pilots were given the minimum of information to also keep the costs down. That meant they were NOT fully informed about the MCAS system on the plane or how it was configured. Sorry if that's long winded, but the problem really stemmed from people who knew nothing about aircraft or flying aircraft making decisions.
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  20.  @malin5468  Thanks. Just remember with your foils on your trimaran. ALL aerodynamic foils stall from angle of attack NOT speed. It doesn't matter if they are in water or air. What you can also get is stalling from what appears to be odd situations. You can have what you think is the AoA but that's NOT the actual AoA experienced. its also called the effective AoA. If you're into sailing you'd know that the sail doesn't have the AoA of the wind because the boats speed changes that and creates and effective AoA.
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  21.  @dennism5731  Here too in Australia we went down the path of sending 80% of our people to university. Both my parents were high school teachers and in the 90s a bonus system for high schools was installed. For every kid they got enrolled in university each high school got a bonus. That made it untenable for any teacher to help a student get into a diploma coarse at what we call TAFE or do an apprenticeship or go into the military, the police or other similar government institution. That was coupled with the funding of our universities which were remodelled economically in the 90s. They were told to "be more business like" but that was taken as "be like a business" they flipped the priority from educating people into making profit. These monetary functions are just more symptoms of neoliberal stupidity. BUT the real catastrophe was the shortage of skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen. All through the 2000s and into the 2010s we had massive shortages of the people we needed to construct the mines and gas plants to feed the Chinese machine. It ended up adding BILLIONS to the costs. BUT the true stupidity of sending 80% of high school students to university is simple math. An IQ 100 is the average and if you have 100 people 50 will be an IQ of 100 or higher and 50 will be an IQ of 100 or lower. So if you send 80 out of every 100 high school students to university it means 30 of them have IQs under 100. Its genuine idiocy because instead of those people doing diplomas, or doing apprenticeships or something else they end up wasting time going to university which costs money. Many of them drop out because they can't do the work and end up with no qualifications or useful skills. The ones who do pass go into easier degrees that nobody wants or needs. Its madness.
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  22. I'm Australian and if you changed the accents and people simply read the transcript NOBODY would spot it wasn't about England. I have friends in Canada and America. We get the news from New Zealand and Asia. We also get the British and European news and its the same SHlT EVERYWHERE. This is also why there's this massive shift to taking conspiracy theories as if they are fact. Out political leaders have become so hopeless at the jobs people have lost faith that they can do anything at all and are turning to alternative answers.
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  23. NEWS FLASH from AUSTALIA to THE BRITISH PEOPLE You were stupid enough to let the economists convince you to sell of your public assets and then even dumber to let Macquarie buy your water infrastructure. Sorry but I don't know any other way to put it except we also listened to the same type of economic nonsense and its choking our economy right now.. I recently watched the IIPP at UCL host Brett Christophers for a book talk on Asset manager Capitalism. Its here on YouTube and is titled "Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World". Previously I had watched Mark Blyth give an ominous warning about Asset Manger capitalism in his talk at the Watson Institute which is also here on YouTube and titled "Mark Blyth– Asset Manager Capitalism". He includes a diagram of how this system works. FYI - We tried reining in Macquarie (along with the rest of our banking and finance industry) and what they were doing a few years ago and FAILED. The Economists stepped in and stifled every suggested action, because in their words "it would harm the economy." What they really meant was that it would hurt their bonus packages, their stock portfolios and their retirement packages. They simply threw the rest of us under the bus.
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  24. Its very simple to his fans he's a force for change and they want change at any cost. Its a reaction to the utter failure of liberal status quo politics which has resulted in the super wealthy becoming even more wealthy while millions are dumped in the gutter. There's a massive slab of America who have been beaten down for decades by a lack of opportunity. They are angry and frustrated and are lashing out. Anthony Scaramucci had this great observation late last year. America has flipped from being aspirational to desperational. Remember Obama's great claim was "Hope & Change" and he failed to deliver BOTH. Hilary Clinton campaigned on "More of the Same" and Joe Biden ran on "Back to Normal" AND THEY ALL FAILED. Richard Wolff who's a Marxist Economist on 9 Dec 2020 during a podcast commented on West Virginia as an example. (Its still here on YouTube) He said those people actually did vote in their economic interest when they flipped from the Democrats to Trump and it was for the simple reason the Democrats had failed them repeatedly while Trump actually went to their towns and said he'd do something. The fact he turned up was enough. A couple of weeks ago Jessica Tarlov commented on a Trump supporter who said "Yes we know he's crazy but crazy doesn't look down on me." That enshrines the real problem with American Liberalism its incredibly SNOBBISH. BOTH Obama's went to Harvard, BOTH Clintons went to Yale and all the people around them think their SHlT doesn't stink and the reason people are poor because they aren't as smart as the elites are. This is why people like Trump and Musk are so appealing. Because as bat crap crazy as they are they don't look down on their fans who are their support base.
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  25.  @westyinzer4607  Then explain why the other 99.9% of the American population can't find Canada or Mexico on a map?
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  26. I'm Australian and I can SADLY SAY that Andrew Marr is hopelessly WRONG "Stop the Boats!" is an incredibly powerful campaign slogan that works, just ask an Australian. Go and google "stop the boats Australia" and see what comes up. There was stuff being said here that is straight out of the Australian election from about 12 years ago when our equivalent of the Conservatives ran that exact campaign and WON. There's even a Guardian article from March this year pointing out how similar Rishi Sunak's policy is to Tony Abbotts winning 2013 campaign. This is one thing the LEFT never understand. When the average person in the street is under stress and struggling they DO NOT GIVE A DAMN about refugees. All they see are people who don't care about them. In late 2022 the American Congressional Budget Office published a report on Family Wealth from 1989 to 2019. I've checked the Australian data it paints a very similar picture. The 2008 GFC hit the lower 50% of America almost 5x harder than the top 10% and almost 4x harder than the middle 40%. Between 2007 and 2010 the bottom 50% of America lost 49.5% of its wealth. By 2019 the Top 10% who were bailed out after the GFC had not only recovered but they were over $20 TRILLION (with a 'T') ahead of there 2007 position. meanwhile the bottom 50% were still almost 22% BEHIND their 2007 position. Not only does the Australian data paint a similar picture but I am certain its the similar across the entire Developed World because there's similar stories of supply shortages, housing crisis and energy crisis. Basically 50% the developed world has been smashed for around 15 years and its only getting worse. So I am sorry to tell the British LEFT but "stop the boats" will work.
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  27. GO and look at a report Bernie Sanders commissioned the Congressional Budget Office to produce on Family Wealth. I covers 1989-2019. Just look at the first graph and you'll have an accurate assessment of the Entire Developed World because we all followed the brilliance of Milton Freidman and the Chicago School Economists which was called Reaganomics in America and Thatcherism in Britain. Here in Australia we called it Economic Rationalism. Most of the World no calls it neoliberalism and its fundamentally based on "Governments are hopeless and therefore should do as little as possible while free markets can solve every problem society has." The problem is IT NEVER WORKED and that's what that CBO report shows. The first graph shows how the Top 10% have gained and gained especially after the 2008 GFC that they caused and were bailed out of while the rest of us paid for those bailouts. The Middle 40% eventually recovered and even got ahead by 2019. HOWEVER: Note how the Bottom 50% lost almost 1/2 of their wealth in the GFC and that by 2019 had STILL NOT RECOVERED. In 2007 they were worth US$2.7 Trillion and by 2019 were only worth $2.3 Trillion. To put perspective on that. During Obamas last 3 years in office (2013-2016) the Top 10% of America gained US$18.3 Trillion in family wealth. YES the Top 10% of America by 2019 roughly 10 years AFTER the GFC they caused were worth over US$80 Trillion which was over US$20 Trillion more than they were worth BEFORE the GFC. So when Trump rocked up saying America sucked and I want to Make America Great Again 50% of the population (around 165 million people) KNEW EXACTLY what he was talking about while the political establishment were in denial as they still are. Trump won again last year for the same reason he won in 2016. He just tapped into the frustration people have with the political establishment.
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  28. Yeah what actually is a "pure democracy"?? There's a lot he's saying is right on point but there's a couple of points that he really should have been more clear about. The part about America's decline in manufacturing as a percentage of World production is correct but he's also NOT including that right after World War 2 the losing side Japan & Germany hade almost zero manufacturing because it had been pulverised. Then he forgets that World production has increased by orders of magnitude. YES in recent decades American output has fallen but that's because their ratbag business leaders moved production to China and other places.
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  29. I don't know is she's the most incompetent there's a lot of competition for that these days. She's certainly the worst to be handed control of a developed nation/country in a while. I'm Australian and what's amazing is that her ignorance of what was actually going on was almost identical to what our equivalent to the Tory Party the Australian Liberal Party showed the last few years. I went to college in America and the Democrats in America who actually are center right party like the Tories and A-Libs have similar issues. they are disconnected from the people they claim to represent, they are trapped in neoliberal economic policies and they think they can say anything and the general population will clap and cheer like their party faithful. They aren't as bad as those parties further to the right like our National Party and the American Republicans who have lost grip with reality.
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  30. Maybe some of you can help explain Nigel Farage.,*because he was just here in Australia doing a lecture tour.* I have no idea why anyone would PAY to listen to him. but maybe some of you guys can explain how no one has held him accountable for not just making Brexit happen but that he walked away after the vote. We all saw him on TV pronouncing to the world how the British people "have won their country back." Then we all saw him resign and pronounce it was up to others to negotiate Brexit. My questions are: How come I don't see anyone calling him out on that? How was it he had no plan on what to do after the vote? How come he walked away and nobody said "Hey you made this happen - now help"?
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  31. AUSTRALIAN HERE: If this was overdubbed with an Australian accent I would NOT be able to tell the difference. Even with the British accent I am struggling to understand if he his talking about Britain or Australia. I'm actually an engineer who's been looking into Economics because of the interference I have seen in the engineering space and the training of skilled tradesmen from economists. AND YES I watch Gary Stevenson's channel here on YT as part of that. Gary has recently confirmed something I worked out and something economists like Steve Keen have been trying to explain. There's 2 major issues with Economics education. 1) It is very narrowly focused on market economics and includes NOTHING regarding any understanding of things like infrastructure or energy systems. Everything is taught from a market perspective rather than a functional perspective. This is why Thames Water has the current issues it has and those issues are being repeated across the entire Western Democratic world and not just in water but also energy, infrastructure, rail and worst of all education. 2) It is uniform across all of the tertiary education systems. All of the text books are printed by Harvard Press, Oxford Press, Cambridge Press,... etc OR they are written by people who studied at or teach at Harvard Press, Oxford Press, Cambridge Press,... etc. The problem at the political level is that EVERY politician in the Western World NO MATTER if they are Left, Right or Center all studied the same economics at university or they have advisors who studied the same economics at university. This is why no matter who wins political power the overall economics doesn't change or only changes very little AND WHY there's no real solutions in sight.
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  32. NEWS FLASH from AUSTALIA to THE BRITISH PEOPLE You were stupid enough to let the economists convince you to sell of your public assets and then even dumber to let Macquarie buy your water infrastructure. Sorry but I don't know any other way to put it except we also listened to the same type of economic nonsense and its choking our economy right now.. I recently watched the IIPP at UCL host Brett Christophers for a book talk on Asset manager Capitalism. Its here on YouTube and is titled "Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World". Previously I had watched Mark Blyth give an ominous warning about Asset Manger capitalism in his talk at the Watson Institute which is also here on YouTube and titled "Mark Blyth– Asset Manager Capitalism". He includes a diagram of how this system works. FYI - We tried reining in Macquarie (along with the rest of our banking and finance industry) and what they were doing a few years ago and FAILED. The Economists stepped in and stifled every suggested action, because in their words "it would harm the economy." What they really meant was that it would hurt their bonus packages, their stock portfolios and their retirement packages. They simply threw the rest of us under the bus.
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  33.  @bigblue6917  Its weird but its a narrative the right do everywhere. 3 years ago Scott Morrison just stood there in one debate repeatedly saying "Labor can't manage money." That was their campaign slogan. Unfortunately COVID spending made them look like a pack of chimps in a cheap 1970s spoof. The guy I am working my way through a lot of his vids after seeing him on this channel is Gary Stevenson. He has a really interesting slant on economics.
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  34. AUSTRALIAN HERE: If this was overdubbed with an Australian accent I would NOT be able to tell the difference. Even with the British accent I am struggling to understand if he his talking about Britain or Australia. I'm actually an engineer who's been looking into Economics because of the interference I have seen in the engineering space and the training of skilled tradesmen from economists. AND YES I watch Gary Stevenson's channel here on YT as part of that. Gary has recently confirmed something I worked out and something economists like Steve Keen have been trying to explain. There's 2 major issues with Economics education. 1) It is very narrowly focused on market economics and includes NOTHING regarding any understanding of things like infrastructure or energy systems. Everything is taught from a market perspective rather than a functional perspective. This is why Thames Water has the current issues it has and those issues are being repeated across the entire Western Democratic world and not just in water but also energy, infrastructure, rail and worst of all education. 2) It is uniform across all of the tertiary education systems. All of the text books are printed by Harvard Press, Oxford Press, Cambridge Press,... etc OR they are written by people who studied at or teach at Harvard Press, Oxford Press, Cambridge Press,... etc. The problem at the political level is that EVERY politician in the Western World NO MATTER if they are Left, Right or Center all studied the same economics at university or they have advisors who studied the same economics at university. This is why no matter who wins political power the overall economics doesn't change or only changes very little AND WHY there's no real solutions in sight.
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  35.  @LCREEGS  Sorry but that has to be one of the most utterly ignorant statements I have ever seen regarding a profession. Economists have UTTERLY ZERO UNDERSTANDING of systems analysis or systems engineering. Unfortunately you've said this to an aerospace engineer so let me fill you in on some details. Historically Systems Analysis came from Systems Engineering which was developed during the 1950s & 1960s as part of the American ICBM program. It became most well known in its use during the Apollo program which is why some people think it came from the Apollo program. After that it became adopted across the entire aerospace industry and after that a few specific areas of engineering adopted systems engineering. One I know of is naval engineering because these days they have very large complex systems to make work. In general aerospace engineers laugh at other engineers who talk about systems engineering and systems analysis because with few exceptions none of them have any idea what they are talking about. The main reason other engineers never learn it let alone use it is because they just don't need it. Either their systems aren't complicated enough to need it or aren't closely coupled enough to need it. You sound like an economist with the standard training all economists get. I recommend you start listening to people like Steve Keen and Mike Radziki who are trying to get economic profession to update itself on how they do their modelling. Steve has for several decades now been trying to point out the ignorance of the economic profession and he is an economist. He also hosts a podcast Steve keen & Friends, which I hope to be on shortly. Another person you should check out is the Scottish political economist Mark Blyth (Brown U.) Among other things mark hosts an irregular podcast with people who have released books called the Rhodes Center Podcast. A couple of economists he's interviewed recently have been scathing of the economics profession and how ignorant it is of what it has done.
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  36. I'm Australian but went to college in America and I have been throwing that fact at them for a couple of years now. Here's a couple of hard facts. 1) We DO NOT need America to deal with the World's issues BUT without America problems like climate change, displaced people, wealth inequality,.... become damn hard to deal with. 2) We have no say in who America chooses to be POTUS but we have to live with the choice. 3) America is still 1/4 of the worlds economy and most of us either trade with, or have security arrangements with of BOTH and if that 1/4 goes away or makes a sudden change then it hits the rest of us. It would even hit those countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea. 4) The US Dollar is still the worlds reserve currency. No matter what the BRICS want they will not be replacing the US$ anytime soon. Almost all international trade is either done in US$ or there's US$ underpinning the currency transactions. 5) The Bank of International Settlements, which is where all of our central banks exchange and settle out all the money that's been exchanged, reported (Dec 2022) that there's now $100 Trillion in FX Swaps (Foreign Exchange Swaps) floating about the markets and most (+65%) are held by non-bank entities. A few people commented on it at the time but its basically gone untouched by the mainstream media. Normally FX Swaps are what's needed by people to do various forms of international trade and investments BUT they are also used by people to bet on the currency markets. Nobody knows exactly how much of the $100 Trillion are bets versus normal business but what is known is that if the US$ suddenly shifts then those FX Swaps go from being bets to being toxic. So whoever the American's pick needs to be VERY VERY VERY responsible for the next 2 terms. The next POTUS not only has some very difficult tasks to deal with in America but they have to DE-TUNE the effect of the US$ in the worlds economy without causing a catastrophe.
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  37. CAN YOU CLOWNS PLEASE HAVE GARY STEVENSON ON If you want to talk about Economics WHY DON'T you have someone on who knows WTF they are speaking about. FYI - I'm Australian and watch everything Gary puts out because what he talks about is just as pertinent in Australia as anywhere else. Also I watched Rachel Reeves interview with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on the YT channel "Leading" and she was spouting the EXACT SAME NONSENSE Margret Thatcher did about TAXING BEFORE SPENDING.
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  38.  @laniefeleski7288  Gerrymandering has been practiced all over the world in various forms Here in Australia we used to joke that in Queensland sheep and bulldozers had more voting rights than people. In Western Australia its dump trucks, bulldozers and diggers with voting rights. In Tasmania its salmon that vote. While in South Australia tuna vote. In parts of Victoria and News South Wales, sheep, cows, dogs and tractors can vote but they aren't allowed to run for office YET. Meanwhile back in the motherland of Britain its worked like this for centuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6mJw50OdZ4
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  39.  @laniefeleski7288  I'd agree with that. The GOP is way worse than the Democrats and particularly the new Trumpian GOP. BUT THEN the problem with the Democrats is they have the attitude "We aren't as bad, therefore we are good." The problem is they FAIL at leadership & governance as well and that's my point. NOBODY SHOULD ACCEPT BAD GOVERNANCE OF THEIR SOCIETY. And just claiming that one party isn't as bad does NOT equate to good governance. I actually put a hypothetical to a bunch of friends of mine a couple of years ago here in Australia. And yes we have the same problem with our establishment parties its just not as toxic. YET I have 5 fav topics - Economy, Industry, Health Care, Education and Environment. I use those 5 because I know that reasonably smart people will agree that: People want an economy that's stable and industries that provide decent careers at every level. People want to know that they will get cared for if they get sick. People want to know their children will get a decent education so they can have a good life. People want an clean environment where they can breath the air, drink the water and eat the food. So I asked these friends what would happen if a new party started and had those 5 things as their core and had clear simple answers on how all 5 could be done or at least made better? One word was common - annihilate. Either that new party would annihilate the establishment parties OR through nefarious means the establishment would annihilate that new party through the media they own or control.
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  40.  @laniefeleski7288  yeah I sort of hear a bit about the erosion of the "checks & balances" but I don't see it as a top level item. Its almost like there are people who get it, but don't want to face it or face up to how hard its going be to fix. How does you fix a problem like the current state of the US Senate? Here in Australia we have a huge problem that I have only recently become aware off in our Judiciary. Our judges in our upper courts can simply seal their judgements and other than the decision. Its ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to get an answer on how or why the judgement was made. How dose any country fix these sorts of entrenched issues where people have built these fortresses? Every country has 1 or more of these entrenched bureaucratic monstrosities with almost no way to reform or fix them.
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