from Crikey

When governments drape a flag over their secrets, we need whistleblowers

Qantas this morning reported a $252 million half-year loss and announced it would cut 5000 jobs as part of an overall plan to reduce costs by $2 billion over 3 years.

The results come as the government weighs up assistance measures for the struggling airline.

According to a February 25 article in the business section of The Washington Post (WP), a senate report has found that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse knowingly enabled and assisted wealthy Americans in avoiding paying US taxes on billions of dollars in income for many years.

Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

We are witnessing history being made. Unfortunately, it's a history-making decline in standards of political behaviour. At least it proves we're not merely imagining that things were better in the old days.

The latest Census Bureau figures on poverty in America, combined with the data on inequality released a week earlier, confirm a shocking new reality. While a sliver of top earners are doing better than they ever have before, for tens of millions of Americans, insecurity - and, for a distressing number, destitution - is the new norm.

When Cardinal George Pell was officially elevated to the status of God's banker this week, Rupert Murdoch was among the first to congratulate him.

A campaign to hold the former Australian prime minister to account wouldn’t be a stunt. It would remind people there is a price to be paid for going to war against all reason.

from Crikey …..

Crikey says: Hockey the king of the left-wing gabfest

Now here's a photo for Joe Hockey's pool room ...

How politicians & business learned to create & manipulate mass-consumer society.

The Century of the Self tells the untold & sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain & the United States.

How was the all-consuming self created, by whom & in whose interests?

‘Hypocrite’ seems the perfect word to describe Immigration Minister Scott Morrison.

On the one hand, when the circumstances suit his government’s agenda, the Minister is happy to allege, without evidence, that a Manus Island detainee was somehow responsible for his own death however, when it becomes clear that is not the case, it suddenly becomes a matter for the police to investigate & resolve.

As ExxonMobil’s CEO, it’s Rex Tillerson’s job to promote the hydraulic fracturing enabling the recent oil and gas boom, and fight regulatory oversight. The oil company is the biggest natural gas producer in the U.S., relying on the controversial drilling technology to extract it.

from Crikey ….

It was truly awful timing.

from Crikey ….

Lest we forget to pay: how Anzac Day became a commercial enterprise