I’ve been reading some fascinating posts lately on the attempts – past and present – to rig U.S. elections. As with all theories that don’t have sufficient supporting evidence, these need to be read with caution. However, there seem to be enough circumstantial evidence to suggest there might be some element of truth in these stories.
In fact, this article in Harper’s, published weeks before the election and worrying about election rigging in 2012, has stories about elections being rigged in the U.S. as far back as 1932. This same article also explains the connections between the two companies that dominate the electronic voting machine market in the U.S. and their connections to the GOP and the Romney family.
I caught up with a guy for a cigar last night and, as usual, we ended up talking about politics and philosophy. I mentioned that I believe Australians (well…. white Australians) are the luckiest people who have ever lived in all of human history (about 107 billion according to a recent estimate). We are one of the wealthiest countries per capita and live in a country with one of the lowest densities per capita. We have very low unemployment, very low rates of violence and pretty good political stability.
And yet… most people don’t seem to FEEL lucky. They bitch and moan constantly. They have been imbued with this sense that they don’t have enough, they should have more, they aren’t keeping up with the Joneses. It’s a sign of a sick society.
Anyhoo, the point being that we, as the luckiest people who have ever lived, have a responsibility to help out the less fortunate.
Here’s a great video that demonstrates how far we, as a species, have come in the last 200 years.
Today I’m chatting with Jenna Price, one of the key people behind the “DESTROY THE JOINT” movement to stop sexism and misogyny in Australia. Jenna talks about the success of their campaign to get advertisers to pull their funding from the Alan Jones Show on 2GB.
Australia is one of only a few countries in the world that has the facilities to design and manufacture a car from digging the raw materials out of the ground to dealer domestic sale. And in the 1970s Australia’s auto industry was ranked 10th place in the World but today? We are in 28th place.
Take this one example – The Ford Falcon, which has been manufactured since 1960 and is currently on life support. Sales last year were 74% less than its best year ever, which was in 2003.
Ford, which has about 3000 employees in Australia, has received an estimated $1 billion in government subsidies since 2000 in an effort to prop up an industry in decline.
The Labor government has committed $5.4 billion for car making from 2008 to 2020.
Meanwhile – the number of small businesses that went bankrupt last double increased by 48% – and none of them received government handouts. Why? My guess is because there aren’t any votes in it.
To explain why the government is spending billions of our dollars to prop up foreign-owned companies, I’m very pleased to be joined today on Skype, by Nicholas Gruen, all the way from San Francisco, who is a prominent Australian economist, the CEO of Lateral Economics, the Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion, the founding chairman of the Aussie start-up Kaggle, and a board member of Innovation Australia.
You can follow Nicholas on Twitter and check out his new start-up HealthKit.
“A Necessary End”
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