En Passant

My latest in Independent Australia. The super profits of the Big Four banks continue to impact on the rest of the economy and Malcolm Turnbull’s solution of ordering them to appear before the Economics Committee is not likely to make them give up those profits.

I have written recently to the Australian Financial Review – a newspaper in the process of joining the fruitcake faction of capital and becoming a more educated version of The Australian – on mining companies and tax and superannuation. In the interests of free speech for more than just billionaires and their sycophants I reproduce below my to date unpublished letters.

The money is there. So why not start all over again? I have a suggestion. How about a 40% super profits tax applying to all resources? Oh…The ghost of Kevin Rudd ensures that won’t happen.

And while we are at it, why not a super profits tax on all super profits, not just those in the resource sector. The Big 4 banks come to mind.

The Labor Government beat the banks with a wet lettuce for failing to pass on the full RBA rates cuts.

Instead why not tax their super profits and redistribute some their profit to the working class in the form of better social services like health and education, increases in Newstart and tax cuts for workers?

And, given you can’t trust the banks, something their actions have shown, how about regulating their interest rates and other offerings? Price controls over interest rates looks like a good start.

So here we have the most profitable banks in the world, the big 4 Australian banks with $31 billion in profits, not prepared to pass on a 0.25% overnight cash rate reduction to their customers on their home and business loans.

Soak the bastards, Treasurer. Hit them with a super profits tax, or threaten to do that.

And when they claim that that would impact on their costs of lending and would need to be recouped, threaten them with interest rate controls and mention you might set up a people’s bank. Oh, I forgot, we used to have one of them until the previous Labor Government flogged it off.

Maybe we should nationalise the banks under workers’ control instead.

It is the polluters who should pay for rebuilding the homes of workers destroyed in the floods. It is big business whose profits should be taxed, not workers.

How about a super profits tax instead Gillard?

The historic role of Labor as the party that rules for capital over sectional business interests is at an end.