Russia, Ukraine and the West

[Vangelovski]

Originally Posted by Risto the Great

Don't want to respond to the content, Forrest? Harvard beneath you? You better get back to Facebook for your factual content.

That article has nothing to do with your claim that corporations control government. It has nothing to do with your retarted theory that somehow the NY Times publishes whatever BlackRock wants it to because it may, or may not, own 10% of the paper. It was completely irrelevant to everything.

Maybe you can tell us some more of your crackpipe theories? You have a thread for that don't you? How about America and its evil corporations causing the earthquake in Turkey? Or the balloons that were shot down - who sent them? Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Trilateral Commission, the Rothchilds, Klaus? What about how the gas companies forced the Albanese Government to put a price cap on gas so they make less money?

Remember the one where you said "the banks" were pissed off that the government was guaranteeing deposits and that the IMF forced it to change legislation but that never actually happened? Some shit about shareholders, which aren't even mentioned in the Banking Act, which is the enabling legislation for the Financial Claims Scheme (you know, that bank deposit guarantee thing)? That was classic you.

[Risto the Great]

The article shows plenty. It shows how our concepts of perfect markets do not exist and how notions underpinning our capitalist model such as "competition" are compromised. But for you, life is pretty simple. Simple is as simple does.

About the banking. Listen, I charge $400 an hour normally. I can work through it all with you for a fee. But for the benefit of others, I submit the following:

SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS A FACTCHECK
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/cla...s-no-currency/

Read how what I said has been refuted here. Moronic people with the mental development and clarity of say Forrest Gump, would accept it as fact. But let's dig in for a moment:

WHAT WAS CLAIMED
The government can take any deposits in excess of $250,000 from your bank account and instead you can receive shares in the bank.

OUR VERDICT
False. The claim is based on opinions that have been investigated by a parliamentary committee and found to be unsupported.

A motivational speaker with a Facebook following of more than 20,000 people has claimed an Australian law introduced in 2018 allows the federal government to “drain your bank account” of deposits over $250,000 in the event of a financial crisis.

It’s not the first time such claims have been made. A similar argument was made by a minor party senator who proposed a law change in 2020 to stop “failed banks taking our money”. However a parliamentary committee which examined the matter found there are already legal protections for bank deposits and the change was unnecessary. Experts in finance law also told AAP FactCheck the claim is “confused”, “extreme” and a strained reading of the legislation.

The claim is made by Espen Hjalmby in a video on his Facebook account on February 24. In the video (2min 30sec mark) he tells his followers to Google “Bail in law 2018 Australia”. Entering that phrase into a Google search brings up as the first result a link to a web page of fringe political organisation the Australian Citizens Party. The web page refers to a piece of legislation, the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Bill 2017 that became law in March 2018.

At the 2min 55sec mark, Hjalmby says in reference to federal parliament: “They snuck in a new law, snuck it in the back door with some of the people voting it in awake and voting it in, the rest were asleep … a law that says the government has a legal right to drain your bank account of anything above $250,000.”

Hjalmby’s claim mirrors language used by the Australian Citizens Party (formerly called the Citizens Electoral Council) and One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts – the politician who sought the 2020 amendment – in arguments that the 2018 legislation allows for failing banks to take money from deposit accounts to maintain stability in a financial crisis.

The basis for Hjalmby’s claim that the law was “snuck in” while some parliamentarians were awake and others asleep is not clear. The final reading and vote on the legislation occurred around lunch time, at 12.30pm on February 14, 2018.

As explained in this ABC News report, the “bail-in” referred to by Hjalmby is the opposite of a government bail-out of banks during a financial crisis. Where a bail-out refers to the government’s guaranteeing of Australians’ bank deposits, a bail-in refers to a scenario in which the bank shores up its financial survival by taking deposits and exchanging them for shares.

In February 2020, Senator Roberts introduced the Banking Amendment (Deposits) Bill 2020 into parliament. The bill aimed to “stop banks in financial trouble from stealing our savings”, according to his media release, by amending the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Bill 2017. But a Senate committee inquiry into Senator Roberts’ bill, after taking advice from the federal Treasury and regulator the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, rejected concerns that deposit accounts of bank customers could be subjected to any kind of bail-in or write-off in a financial crisis.

In its final view the committee stated: “The committee concurs with the advice of the Treasury and APRA that the explicit protection of deposits in the Banking Act – the objects clause, priority repayment, and the Financial Claims Scheme – is inconsistent with a concern deposit accounts could be subject to any kind of conversion, write-off or bail-in.”

Legal experts told AAP FactCheck there is no truth to Hjalmby’s claim.

Associate Professor Andrew Godwin, from the University of Melbourne, said the legislation empowered APRA to direct certain types of “hybrid securities” to be compulsorily converted into shares in the bank, and that the argument was about whether that could extend to bank deposits.

“In my view this is a strained interpretation as bank deposits up to $250,000 are guaranteed under the deposit guarantee scheme that the government introduced during the Global Financial Crisis,” he said in an email.

Dr Godwin said the target of the bail-in power was hybrid securities, such as contingent convertible bonds, that are issued by banks to investors in the knowledge that they are subject to bail-in.

“Those who argue that the legislation is ambiguous claim that the reference to ‘hybrid securities and other instruments’ could capture bank deposits. Although there may be legitimate arguments as to the technical meaning of ‘instruments’, I think it is far-fetched to interpret the legislation in this way,” he said.

UNSW Scientia Professor Ross Philip Buckley, from the Faculty of Law & Justice, told AAP FactCheck the Australian government could not order the conversion of people’s bank deposits into shares.

“An extreme and strained reading of a phrase in the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Act 2018 (Cth) could lead to that result but it is not a reading any Australian court would adopt,” he said in an email.

Associate Professor Will Bateman, a legal expert from ANU, said the claim had “no truth”.

“There is no truth in the statement of the social media influencer regarding the use of regulator powers to ‘bail-in’ deposit accounts at Australian banks,” Dr Bateman said in an email.

“Australia has a system of deposit insurance under which the government agrees to insure the contents of deposit accounts up to $250,000/customer/ADI in the unlikely event of a bank failure. That system is called the Financial Claims Scheme. The Australian banking regulator, APRA, is under a legal duty (s12, Banking Act 1959 (Cth) to protect depositors which would preclude the use of ‘bail in’ powers in respect of deposit accounts.”

Dr Bateman said Australia also has constitutional protections that prevent the government acquiring property, including deposit accounts without providing ‘just terms’, or compensation, under section 51 (xxxi) of the Constitution.

“Those protections prevent the situation described by the influencer from occurring in Australia,” he said.

Some clues for the less intellectually capable:

http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/leg...8816/sch1.html
(No definition of "financial instrument")

an instrument converts into one or more ordinary shares or mutual equity interests of an entity including by redeeming or cancelling the instrument or rights under the instrument, and replacing the instrument or rights with ordinary shares or mutual equity interests (as the case requires)

Politicians introducing this banking theft said "this only applies to those complicated hybrid securities, not mum and dad's money in their bank accounts." The problem with that is they didn't exclude CASH DEPOSITS in the legislation. And financial instruments include CASH.

Of particular concern is the belief that the first $250K deposits are protected. I don't even believe that is the case, because the money will be converted into shares and the bank won't be broke. Therefore the $250K bailout won't even be triggered.

So, we have a "strained" reading of the legislation. And some professor "thinks" it won't apply. But here's the problem, my professional background enables me to use my experiences with taxation law to confirm that the black and white of legislation wording is commonly repurposed to capture future events. If anyone is interested, they could look at s100A and its application to trusts as absolute proof of that.

In short, I fact checked the fact checking link above and my verdict is the false claim is false. But morons think everything is ok

BTW the fact check link was provided by AAP ..... AAP is owned by "philanthropists" nowadays.

Classic me signing off.
More available (for a fee)

[Vangelovski]

Originally Posted by Risto the Great

The article shows plenty. It shows how our concepts of perfect markets do not exist and how notions underpinning our capitalist model such as "competition" are compromised.

Who said it was perfect? You're comprehension skills are getting worse by the day. YOUR claim was that corporations control government. That article said absolutely NOTHING to support YOUR claim.

SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS A FACTCHECK
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/cla...s-no-currency/

Read how what I said has been refuted here.

Yes, you did just provide an article that REFUTES what YOU said. Thanks. And you still keep insisting that what you said is true while providing evidence for the opposite.

In short, I fact checked the fact checking link above and my verdict is the false claim is false.

WTF?!?!?!?!

Originally Posted by Risto the Great

Listen, I charge $400 an hour normally.

Tell us more Mr $400 an hour...

[Risto the Great]

Forrest. You're just not getting it. Probably a vaccine side effect.

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Vangelovski

...YOUR claim was that corporations control government. That article said absolutely NOTHING to support YOUR claim...

Every reply of yours is always an engagement of some sort of futile battle with semantics and the surgical dissection of every single word and phrase that was written by someone on the run as mere commentary, you always demand others to provide you the equivalent of a PhD dissertation...all while you stand comfortably behind what was reported in the Hindustan Times.

The lofty professional standards that you like to hold others accountable to, don't readily apply to your good self.

Corporations and/or special interest groups control and/or influence governments...End of Story...to argue ANYTHING to the contrary is to divorce yourself from reality.

The entire US political system is influenced by lobbyists working on behalf of corporations and/or special interest groups to control and/or influence government and this very process results in varying degrees of corruption (in all of its forms)...the same is true for every political system, to argue otherwise is a complete and utter nonsense and seems to be just a need to be ridiculously disagreeable.

[kompir]

Originally Posted by Risto the Great

Forrest. You're just not getting it. Probably a vaccine side effect.

The ambiguity in the various statutes is deliberate and gives govco and the banks a double advantage:

- it gives them plausible deniability when questioned.
- it gives them the ability to arbitrarily define what is a financial instrument and thus the ability to take depositor funds.

[kompir]

Originally Posted by Phoenix

Every reply of yours is always an engagement of some sort of futile battle with semantics and the surgical dissection of every single word and phrase that was written by someone on the run as mere commentary, you always demand others to provide you the equivalent of a PhD dissertation...all while you stand comfortably behind what was reported in the Hindustan Times.

The lofty professional standards that you like to hold others accountable to, don't readily apply to your good self.

Corporations and/or special interest groups control and/or influence governments...End of Story...to argue ANYTHING to the contrary is to divorce yourself from reality.

The entire US political system is influenced by lobbyists working on behalf of corporations and/or special interest groups to control and/or influence government and this very process results in varying degrees of corruption (in all of its forms)...the same is true for every political system, to argue otherwise is a complete and utter nonsense and seems to be just a need to be ridiculously disagreeable.

And that is just the overt government everyone sees and interacts with, the government in the shadows (the Fed and MIC (military industrial complex)) which controls the real power base in the US is DIRECTLY owned by private interests AND is guilty of crimes and corruption orders of magnitude worse than the criminality committed by the overt government.

[Vangelovski]

Originally Posted by Phoenix

Every reply of yours is always an engagement of some sort of futile battle with semantics and the surgical dissection of every single word and phrase that was written by someone on the run as mere commentary, you always demand others to provide you the equivalent of a PhD dissertation...

What semantics? RtG claimed corporations control governments, then provided a completely irrelevant article and then provided an article that actually refuted what he was saying. You come in with some whinge about semantics. Do you also charge $400 an hour for your half a cents worth?

Corporations and/or special interest groups control and/or influence governments...End of Story...to argue ANYTHING to the contrary is to divorce yourself from reality.

Control and influence are two completely different things. I'd tell you to refer to a dictionary but you probably won't because it may or may not have been published by a corporation. No one said corporations don't influence government. Influence isn't necessarily a bad thing. Corporations are a part of society and the economy and should gave a genuine say in the laws that govern them. But there is of course, undue influence. No denying that. But control. No. No corporation controls government. That is a gigantic leap and you'd need your head examined.

[Risto the Great]

Joe Biden just announced the US is going to be supporting the pensions in Ukraine. I am absolutely positive Ukraine will owe nothing in return. I am Forrest Gump.

[Vangelovski]

Originally Posted by Risto the Great

Joe Biden just announced the US is going to be supporting the pensions in Ukraine. I am absolutely positive Ukraine will owe nothing in return. I am Forrest Gump.

No, you're Mr $400 an hour.