Nothing sums up how inncoulated the NZ population are to the debate about inequality than today’s Political Roundup in the NZ Herald by Bryce Edwards.
Academics have been pushing the alarm bell on our disgraceful inequality for decades and they have all been ignored.
They were ignored when Ruth Richardson pushed through the Mother of all Budgets and set the amount paid to beneficiaries just below the adult minimum nutritional guidelines.
They were ignored when Helen Clark was in power.
They’ve been ignored by the last 9 years of National.
The issue, as Edwards points out in his column, is now degraded to a debate with other Academics about how one actually measures inequality.
Meanwhile the property bubble pulses to the surreal value of a Trillion dollars.
This is why the debate about inequality is so muted in the ears of many NZers.
They own property now.
You have a mainstream corporate media who are owned by the banks and propped up by speculative property market advertising producing news to an audience of property speculators.
That audience don’t want to hear about inequality beyond a ‘poor-them-someone-should-do-something-I-must-donate-to-the-city-mission’ style narrative because no one wants to hear the solution to our inequality means their wealth illusion has to go pop first.
Inequality is now an argument between Public Academics and right wing think tanks who debate how to measure inequality so that in the voters mind there’s still some plausible denial over the whole issue.
Like a smoker who wants to believe the Tobacco Industries claims that there is no direct link between their product and cancer.
Like a Coal Company that refuses to see global warming because of human pollution.
Inequality hasn’t been settled, the news media who are captured by the free market property speculation have no interest in challenging it in any meaningful way and those land owners consuming that news media are speculators themselves who won’t tolerate anything more than passing sympathy for those at the sharp end of their gain.
Is there a greater juxtaposition than today’s Political Roundup where meaningless bullshit arguments of definition are played out to a bored audience who don’t want to hear any actual solutions and the sudden eruption in the news media of a gang war breaking out between the Mongrel Mob and Black Power?
Far beyond the social media echo cambers of our corporate media and punditry, inequality and its massive yawning void has engulfed a small town over a funeral.
This is where vicious inequality leads us. This naked refusal of law and order because they aren’t your laws and it sure as hell ain’t your order. The desperate and the angry and the nothings to lose people of New Zealand are hurting and have been hurting for decades now.
Social media allows the spread of explosions in this cauldron of fury in a way unlike any other time in our history.
Right now the friction points of unemployment, welfare crackdowns, a prison population exploding to 10 000, homelessness and massive amounts of meth imported by organised crime that has changed the economic model for gangs are choking off their ability to survive and they are turning on each other in desperation.
This is the coal face of inequality and we’re feeding it through a rigged system of property speculation.
What does the media focus on once Oxfam release their report on inequality? Why they interview some naive beggar who boasts about getting $150 per day and follow that up with a Bob Jones hate rant, the man who gloated about goading a beggar into suicide.
Charming.
You have a growing desperation by a significant part of the country hurtling towards a complacent elite who are being told what they want to believe by a clickbait mainstream media.
Somethings gotta give.
The Mob crossed the river. I must have missed something. They wouldn’t have crossed that river like that with out reason. The National president of the Mongral mod was laid to rest last year, so that fits with yesterday’s brake from tradition that was a thin word of mouth truce. How ever it’s not an act of violence, even though violence stalks them like a plague.
I think we will see more of this behaviour but it’s not a war. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I think the mob is being mischief on the side of peace.
why did you read the herald? its not really news worthy is it?
It’s good to know what stupid doesn’t want to do. That gives a good indication of what should be done.
And we can’t have every one reading the herald, so Martyn has to take one for the team.
After Russel Coatts got framed by the herald. I refuse to go there. I comment on there bulkshit stories. But that’s as far as I’m willing to go.
You have to read the propaganda to be able to classify and contradict it. I’m glad some one does it. I hate to see the direction the Herald is pushing, with only a few spots of liberal opinion allowed on it’s pages.
While we have people like Lizzie marvelly banging on about nonsense issues and lecturing working class on stupid pointless issues we are not going to improve anything,
The left consists of fashionable socialites completely out of touch with reality
King’s College educated, regurgitator of US identity politics and third-wave feminism.
Intended by the Herald as a trendy and palatable left wing voice, poor substitute for Tapu Misa.
Under Donkey/Bile English we will continue to see further hate for our fellow humans struggling through life until we see the nasty Natz removed from power later this year.
Yep. The civil war will start and many “NZers” (isn’t New Zealander now just a person from anywhere on the planet who is in the Shaky Isles?) will not see it coming… the signs are all there… a house divided will fall
Aaah Castro, still beating that old ‘civil war’ drum i see! Can we all assume you will keep telling us all that the ‘war’ is just around the corner, and prey tell rather than just saying ‘tomorrow’ which funnilly enough never arrives, care to put your reputation where your mouth is and give us all a date that you believe it will all kick off? Or will that defeat all your posts after the date passes and nothing happens!
After decades of complicit MSM, degenerating further year by year, hungry for any money to survive, so many people have been dumbed down to the extreme. They are kept busy to fight for survival, or are distracted and kept occupied with trivial activities like tweeting and commenting on often frivolous and dumb social media, they simply accept the place they have been assigned in society.
So the poor are not starving, while some go hungry, but their numbers are too few to start a revolution. They are told, hey, give it a go, get a job, work, work and work more, do your 40 to 80 hours a week, one day you will achieve to get there, where the others are, the middle class and better off, so hang in there, just put up with things for time being.
They have been put into their place and simply accept it, so inequality may increase or stay stable, but nobody does anything to change the status quo.
A hopeless situation, based on people feeling powerless, or hanging in there, hoping for a lotto win or something similar, that is where we are. MSM just play their part, keeping it all as it is meant to be, by the top few percent who run the show.
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