Yesterday the JusTrade.nz, site was launched. It builds on a two-day hui held in late October, convened by Auckland Law Professor Jane Kelsey, which debated what an alternative 21st Century progressive trade strategy for our counrty could look like.
‘The message from the hui was very clear” says Prof Kelsey in announcing the launch of the new site ” we need to generate real alternatives that confront climate change and disruption, while supporting sustainable local businesses and jobs that pay a living wage, in a nation founded on te Tiriti o Waitangi.’
As many of you are aware I am working on a crowd funded documentary currently titled Trade Secrets in which I investigate who really benefits from the huge international agreements we have been entering into and ask the very same question the JustTrade site seeks to answer: Is there a better, fairer , more progressive way to trade ?
You can find the site here:
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Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
Thanks Bryan for your alert to this very important public movement to finally re-balance the global trading environment from the global elite who now control the trading system to rort the system, and instead we need to place it back into the hands of small producers to trade in a fair place for their products.
Interesting….@ Bryan Bruce.
I was watching an episode of the ever superb Peaky Blinders once where-in the lead character was talking to a watersider in a particular scene. The watersider said something like “… Oh aye Mr Shelby. Will be done… Soon as they unload the Dunedin o’er there just docked with meat all the way from New Zealand. ”
I watched my mother die a terrible death and penniless from being swindled by the then manager of the Timaru branch of the BNZ after more than fifty years as a farmer. My father preceded her similarly a few years earlier. My aunt, who lived with us for most of her life, went on to exist in virtual poverty then passed away on her feet at 90.
As a consequence, I have a terrible affliction known as Irish, Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve forget everything except the grudge.
( A word on Alzheimer’s disease just in via Boingboing.net ( https://boingboing.net/2019/01/07/weed-is-even-better-for-old-fo.html )
It’s my humble opinion, that, whoever tackles the deep, dark depths of NZ/AO’s ancient, and no so ancient, and horrible swindles with regard to our primary export industry and the farmers who built that industry will be, in time to come, be regarded as NZ/AO hero’s.
I know. Big Bold Words. And I do get shit flung at me from the Apes in the jungle for daring to defend the truths about our agriculture and our farmers but then I say to myself. “ Fuck you’s, you’s Apes! “
NZ/AO’s political mandates which has led to our dysfunctional society was imbedded in our governance by the criminals who grifted farmer money away after the farmer who were, and are, forced to accept a pittance for their product. Those criminal few can only be described as polite mafia who once having laundered that money through ‘producer boards’ and the BNZ at the time, grew rich and created dysfunctional fiefdoms who, to this day, hold NZ/AO to ransom, stifle our development and create, from poverty and hardship, monsters out of good people.
There. How about that?
Was that an earthquake? Or was that caused by the inertia of eyeballs rolling?
Oh… By the way.
I nearly forgot and my apologies for veering so far off-topic that I did, indeed, see the far side of paula bennett’s buttocks. Out there, past the Chinese side of the dark side of the moon, past the Mars that everybody’s told that everybody wants to go to but no one actually does, except Mat Damon! Out there past the Van Hoo Ha Belt and beyond. Out there, in the Outlands, where time and space warp into the singularity that is paula bennett’s vast, un -chartable backside.
There! There is where I veered to. My apologies.
How to ‘trade’ in a fairer way?
Well, we used to ‘trade’ with the UK, The U$A and Europe etc. That seemed fair on reflection did it not? Progressive and equal economies ‘trading’ goods to best suit each others needs? Seemed fair to me back in the day when we could buy stuff and things made in Great Britain or Made in America.
We’d send them our ‘stuff’. And they’d us send back ‘ things’.
What happened?
Why, did we suddenly veer off on another vector? A cheap arse vector which has seen our country swamped in plastic shit made by all but slave labour in oppressed ‘developing’ countries, and given that scientists have found plastic in human shit, that statement’s both literal AND metaphorical.
So? What happened?
I know what happened. But do you know, the collective you’s? Do you know?
Pig muldoon and un-holyoak strapped us to the Australians like a dildo on a budget Dom’ for a starter and the Australians have been rogering us with ourselves ever since.
Our riche criminal 1%er scum also subverted our political mandates to destabilise the relationship between us urban lot and our rural lot and in that manufactured confusion, they continue to fuck us over to this day.
The legendary and infamous water sider strikes of the day were an example of what were to be early examples of Professor Stanley Milgram’s mass psychological manipulations and is frankly psych’ 101 today. Anyone can go on-line and read all about it.
My father knew what was ‘going on’ and tried to convince farmers back in the late 1960’s to form a union ( compulsory! ) then morph with the farmers’ down stream service industry, like warfies’ railway workers, the road transport industry, the freezing workers union and the shearers unions to afford the protection we desperately and urgently needed etc but OMG! Did he ever get noticed! There were spooks coming out of the wood work in humble, rural Southland and I was there, albeit as a child but I can remember some of the strange ( not so strange ) goings on.
I can tell you about the swindles of the wool board too. Of how they used to stock pile wool once they bought the stuff off the farmers they starved into submission by using raging interest rates and galloping costs. They’d triple dump ( Squeeze three ex woolshed bales into one black-hole bale which took up less space for shipping. ) then stock pile that wool then put the squeeze on the UK,EU and U$A textiles manufacturers ( i.e. our trading partners! ) to push up per kg prices FOR THEM! OUR KIWI-AS BANKSTER BUDDY SWINDLERS! You know how I know that? Of course you don’t. It was a figure of speech. I know that, because I knew a French wool buyer who would bemoan the difficulties of buying the wool they wanted that the wool board wouldn’t sell them! And all that shit conveniently coincided with mysterious fluctuations in the value of the Kiwi dollar originating from our very own reserve bank-ster. In their favour, of course. Are you still wondering why we have such Big Fancy Foreign Bankster Buildings cuing up along Auckland’s water front making off with record profits ( one of which, anz, has The Shiny Jonky on it’s board gloating about how he stole $2 billion out of our economy for his little fuck buddies off-shore. )
Kiwi people can’t yet quite get their heads around just how bent our financial systems are. It’s so big that it’s invisible. It’s a bit like expecting the ant to understand the Eiffel tower that it stands beside. All it might see is a wall of steel. Unless it dropped LSD then stood back a few K’s. Then, it’d get perhaps.
I can totally believe your words CB.
People happy rip off other people for their own gain.
I have seen the big sell off of NZ in my lifetime.
THEN: NZ, the producers of everything.
NOW: NZ, the producers of nothing.
Can we ever return?
Thats a pretty sad story CB. That would have been something else if your Dad had been able to set up a farmers union. We seriously need some land reform but very unlikely.
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