The Left Wing - World Wide

[Redneck]

$1.46/gallon today. Russia and OPEC are trying to force our domestic production out of business.

Consider yourself lucky lots are paying that or more per litre

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

In fact that chart is wrong for Australia where it is around $1.40/litre for unleaded 91 in most areas.

[Black Orchid]

I have stated, truthfully, that the Chinese people have more freedom than we have in Australia, providing they do the right thing.

You don't see a contradiction there? Seriously? "Providing they do the right thing" by edict of the CCP is what you call freedom?

What are all these feigned freedoms that the Chinese have that we don't have in Australia?

[Valkie]

I have stated, truthfully, that the Chinese people have more freedom than we have in Australia, providing they do the right thing.

You don't see a contradiction there? Seriously? "Providing they do the right thing" by edict of the CCP is what you call freedom?

What are all these feigned freedoms that the Chinese have that we don't have in Australia?

Criminals in China are punished.
Sometimes the punishment is a little draconian, but when you have billions of people, lives are cheap.
By "doing the right thing" you know I mean " don't be a criminal".
Any honest Chinese, can travel where they want, do basically anything they want and amass as much money as they can earn.
There are more millionaire Chinese than virtually any other demographic.

And yes, bribery is a part of business in China, exactly as it is in every other country and more so in Australia.
It's just hidden and denied in Australia.

The Chinese keep an eye on their people, just as they do in Australia.
But our grubberment do it clandestinely, and deny, deny, deny, while they go through everything you do.

The people I worked with in China, my friends and their families lived reasonably well, by Chinese standards.
It's a poor country for most, but opportunity is there if you work hard.

Start causing any trouble.
ANF you bring down the wrath of the military, and you don't want that.
Just ask the musso nutcases who decided to start killing people at a train station.
No muzzo problem in China, they are being RE-EDUCATED.

It's not utopian, any country with politicians in control ever will be.
But it's not the horror that western leaders paint it, for obvious reasons.

[Black Orchid]

Ethics: As Democrats demonize Wall Street CEOs as the "greedy" fiends of the financial crisis, they've lined their own pockets — both before and after the crisis. Nancy Pelosi's just the latest example.


The former House speaker allegedly gamed financial reforms to boost her personal stock portfolio. The brewing scandal is complicated, but here's the Reader's Digest version:


After a Pelosi staffer left to lobby on behalf of credit-card giant Visa, Pelosi delayed bringing to the House floor a bill to end lucrative "swipe fees" for Visa and other credit providers.


The bill couldn't have come at a worse time for Visa. It planned to launch an $18 billion public stock offering, so stalling Hill action became a priority. The San Francisco-based company curried favor with Pelosi by pumping cash into her re-election efforts, earning its CEO a rare one-on-one meeting with the speaker.


At the same time, Visa offered her husband a VIP cut of the IPO. Paul Pelosi jumped at the offer, buying 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. In a couple of days, the shares soared to $64. Pelosi later bought 15,000 more, raising the total value of his investment to about $5 million. In the end, the legislation Visa fought starting in 2007 was forestalled two full years.


Publicly, Nancy Pelosi has been a frequent critic of the financial industry. The commission she impaneled in 2009 to investigate the root causes of the crisis summarily indicted Wall Street honchos, while exonerating guilty Democrats, including several who had their hands in the subprime pot. Among them:

Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's CEO through 2005, who helped plunge the government-sponsored mortgage giant into the subprime abyss, while cooking Fannie's books to score fatter bonuses for himself and other Clinton Democrats on its board. Despite holding 20 hearings and 700 interviews, Pelosi's commission never found room for Raines on the witness list. One of the prime suspects in the crisis got off scot-free.


Henry Cisneros, Clinton's housing chief who strong-armed Countrywide Financial into signing "fair lending" contracts that exposed it to billions in risky subprime loans. Cisneros later joined Countrywide's board. (Pelosi's son also worked for Countrywide.)


Rahm Emanuel, who served on Freddie Mac's board, where he pocketed $320,000 before making millions working for an investment banker in Chicago that brokered high-cost subprime loans to minorities.


Barney Frank, who was one of Fannie's and Freddie's biggest protectors — and beneficiaries of their political donations — on Capitol Hill. Frank landed a plum Fannie job for his gay partner, Herb Moses, whose work involved relaxing Fannie's restrictions on home loans. Frank previously led the House committee charged with oversight of Fannie, which also gave at least $25,000 to Frank's mother's charity in Boston. His glaring conflicts of interest were never investigated.


Chris Dodd, the ex-Democratic senator who scored not one, but two sweetheart Countrywide mortgages, while protecting Fannie as head of the Senate committee charged with oversight of Fannie. Countrywide was Fannie's biggest customer.


Dodd and Frank did more than any other lawmakers to cover up the risks Fannie and Freddie took meeting government-imposed affordable lending quotas. Yet they got to write the law to supposedly stop the next financial crisis — one that doesn't even lay a glove on Fannie and Freddie, who together held or guaranteed almost half the subprime and other bad loans in the system when it crashed in 2008.


Maxine Waters, senior Democratic member of the House banking committee who defended Raines by arguing that reining him in would only hurt lending to lower-income and minority households.


After the subprime crisis, Waters allegedly swung $12 million in federal bailout money to her husband's ailing minority bank. Regulators cited OneUnited Bank for poor lending practices and excessive executive pay and perks — including providing its CEO a $6 million mansion and a Porsche SUV. The Waters at the time owned more than $350,000 in OneUnited stock.


It wasn't the first time Waters used her power to advance the interests of the bank. In 2002, when her husband first became a shareholder in OneUnited, the bank (then known as Boston Bank of Commerce) tried to purchase Family Savings, another minority-owned bank in Los Angeles. But when the thrift turned instead to a suitor in Illinois, Waters tried to block the merger by contacting FDIC regulators. Her efforts paid off. The thrift ended up merging with her husband's bank.


Waters remains one of Washington's most outspoken critics of "greedy" Wall Street bankers — whom she says conspired with Republicans to create the crisis.


But Democrats ought to look in the mirror. Their colleague Jon Corzine wasn't just tied to Wall Street bankers. He was one — and one of the worst.


As a Democratic senator and governor of New Jersey, Corzine decried income inequality and Wall Street pay. Then he joined MF Global Holdings and bagged a $14 million compensation package — including $2 million in guaranteed bonuses, regardless of performance.


It took Corzine just 18 months to run the Wall Street brokerage into the ground with risky bets on euro zone debt. Just hours before filing for bankruptcy, Corzine continued paying out executive bonuses, mimicking the actions of Wall Street CEOs he had criticized during the crisis.


The list of financial "greed" and sleaze on the left is long. What a bunch of hypocrites.

https://www.investors.com/politics/edit ... io-cortez/

This is ok though because they are leftists.

[The4thEstate]

I guess catching the coronavirus qualifies as "not doing the right thing" in China.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3881683

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As the World Health Organization (WHO) praises China for its "tailored approach" to handling the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, a video has surfaced of a Chinese woman vividly describing patients being bound in body bags and cremated while still alive.

Serves those scofflaws right!

[Black Orchid]

Lots of videos came out then disappeared *poof* Funny that!

There were a few with people laying dead in the street and another I saw was a lady who had a funeral home saying she was one of many funeral homes and she alone was getting HUNDREDS of bodies every day and she couldn't cope and she was begging for help.

Another one I saw had bodies wrapped in plastic on the floors in a hospital.

And they say they have 2 dead per million. Yeah right!

[Valkie]

Spoke to my mate in China last night.

It's still not great in Shanghai, but it is getting better.

Everything is being suppressed in China, but he has ways of getting access to the real web.
Another example of communist China being sneaky I hear you say.

But Australia wouldn't suppress information now would it.

After all, we all know about the monkey problem in good old Victoria, don't We?

China will get back on its feet pretty quick
They will allow the population to self immunize but exposure and thinning the herd.

Just like our grubberment did, letting that boat load of infectious cruise trippers wander through the country.

I notice all the pollies and senior public servants have all gone to ground.

[The4thEstate]

$1.46/gallon today. Russia and OPEC are trying to force our domestic production out of business.

I just paid $1.19 per gallon in the Indianapolis area. And I later saw a station selling it for $1.17.

That figures out to 31 cents per liter for the non-Yanks in the audience. And I just saw a photo of a gas station in Miami, Oklahoma, that was charging 98 cents.

But then, I can remember a time, before the rise of OPEC in the early 1970s, when gasoline could be purchased for less than 30 cents a gallon, or about 7 cents per liter.

After OPEC began putting the screws to Western nations, one writer quipped that the oil-consuming nations should form their own cartel known as the Organization for Fuel Using Countries. You can appreciate that acronym!

[Texan]

I'm seeing $1.34 in Dallas.

[Black Orchid]

Here we have the leftist media shutting down a story about their commie comrades in China. Can't print the truth now can we?

NPR published a revealing story today about Bloomberg News, specifically it’s handling of a story which would have been critical of wealthy Chinese communists including Xi Jinping. Bloomberg killed the story over concern the entire news outlet would be kicked out of China if it were published. The story in question was actually a follow-up to a story published in 2012 which won the site awards. The follow-up gained steam in 2013 and suddenly the head office went silent. The story was killed and, officially, the excuse given was that it needed more reporting. But months later the editor-in-chief spelled out the real reason on a conference call:

Finally, in late October 2013, Bloomberg’s famously intense founding editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, weighed in, via a private conference call. In attendance: senior news executives in New York and the China-based investigative team. NPR has obtained audio of Winkler’s remarks on the call.

“It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country,” Winkler said. “So, I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.”…

Winkler suggested reporters could find a uniquely “Bloomberg” way to cover the wealth of Chinese ruling elites. But he added a caution about covering the regime.

“It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is … smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere,” Winkler said, according to the audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. “And that’s who they are. And we should have no illusions about it.”

The concern wasn’t merely that China could kick Bloomberg News out of the country but that it could take action against Mike Bloomberg’s other business interests which are the basis of his fortune. Mike Bloomberg was asked about the controversy in 2014 and said, “If a country gives you the license to do something with certain restrictions, you have two choices. You either accept the license and do it that way, or you don’t do business there.” That sounds a lot like the NBA’s approach to China, i.e. if they don’t want you to support human rights for Hong Kong you keep quiet about that particular issue.

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/20 ... ommunists/

That deserves a big tsk tsk