New Zealand is a tiny country and it is incredibly easy to manipulate the narrative and seed the debate the way vested interests want it seeded. We are seeing some incredible propaganda campaigns being run in NZ right now and it’s worth reminding people about them as we pick our way through the minefield of fake news.
Big Dairy Fresh Water Propaganda:
No one does wholesale propaganda in NZ better than Dairy. Their TV advert campaigns last year where Richie McCaw wanders around pristine farms and gets watery eyed as he speaks of Dairy Farmers with the same devotion the Pope speaks of Jesus is hilarious if it weren’t so weird.
Big Dairy have now moved from trying to canonise Dairy Farmers into making urban folk think they are actually the reason for dirty rivers with their ‘pure’ campaign…
The public relations war over freshwater has re-started
Around this time last year, I wrote about a seemingly innocuous PR campaign called Swim Fresh, which encouraged New Zealanders to appreciate their rivers and lakes.
It had the trappings of a grassroots campaign, albeit one with a vague purpose. After some digging, it turned out to be murky.
The campaign was run by Blackland PR – a communications agency that specialises in rural issues – ostensibly with the cooperation of students from Massey University (the university later denied it had sanctioned any student involvement in the campaign, contrary to what Blackland PR had said).
Several press releases from the campaign were repeated almost verbatim on mainstream news websites: One in particular noted that people didn’t swim in rivers because they were too cold.
Swim Fresh fleetingly acknowledged concerns about water quality, but never in a way that lingered on them, in contrast to the election campaign several months earlier which had underlined those concerns among the public.
In these campaigns, the underlying issue – in this case, deteriorating water quality – isn’t denied, per se, but responsibility for it is subtly shifted.
Tobacco giant Philip Morris responded to concerns about the link between secondhand smoke and diseases such as lung cancer by launching a campaign that cherry-picked data to equate the risks of secondhand smoke to drinking milk or eating biscuits.
Fuel company Exxon published regular ads in major newspapers minimising its role in climate pollution by claiming far more scientific uncertainty about the causes of climate change than actually existed.
A common thread in these campaigns is that they originate from economically powerful industries at a time when public scrutiny of their activities is high.
Swim Fresh quickly faded, and made little discernible impact. But it has been reborn, at least in spirit, in a way that shows how industry messaging is having a growing influence on the tone of a public debate.
DairyNZ launched a campaign late last year called The vision is clear.
The lobby group described it as a “movement… to encourage and inspire every New Zealander to think about their personal impact on our country’s water quality.”
It is partly the product of an agreement with Auckland-based NZME., publishers of the NZ Herald and owner of several radio stations, which hosts content produced by DairyNZ on its platforms.
…one of the real dangers here are these bullshit media partnerships. The Herald, TVNZ and MediaWorks are desperate for revenue so Big Dairy just buy huge TV advert campaigns, sponsor shows and of course do these astro turf partnership scams where they seed lies through ‘lobby groups’ to con NZers into thinking there isn’t a problem with the nitrates and pollution they pour into our waterways. The scam-lie now is how everyone else other than the Farmers are responsible for water pollution…
The campaign shares superficial similarities to Swim Fresh. The Hits radio station is running a competition called Clear Favourite, inviting listeners to submit pictures of their favourite swimming spot for the chance to win a $10,000 holiday. It borrows some of the grassroots-feel, too, in its description as a “movement,” rather than an industry-funded public relations exercise. (It is always made apparent that DairyNZ is behind the content).
The campaign’s biggest presence is a series of articles and advertisements published in the NZ Herald, which are all optimistic, inoffensive, and ruthlessly on message.
One article touts 10 ways you can help clean up waterways: The tips include using a bucket instead of a hose to wash your car and picking up three bits of rubbish when you go to the beach. In the print version of the NZ Herald, a prominent ad noted that one way to improve water quality was to sweep one’s paths and driveways.
On the website, there are several articles about beach pollution, and urban waterways that are being cleaned up. There are stories about new technologies that could help reduce contamination in waterways, and several that detail how award-winning farmers have reduced their environmental footprint. All are soberly written and factually based.
While Swim Fresh was vague and amateurish, The vision is clear follows its blueprint with a strident sense of purpose. Yes, there’s a problem with water quality, it concludes; We all have a responsibility to fix it.
By partnering with the publisher of Auckland’s largest newspaper, it’s not difficult to guess who the campaign is targeting.
As observed by Glen Herud of Happy Cow Milk, any time someone in Auckland washes their car on a driveway, it should prompt cognitive dissonance: If my actions pollute waterways, then what right do I have to feel critically towards the dairy industry?
…the ease with which Big Dairy can con the sleepy hobbits of muddle Nu Zilind into believing that they are actually the ones responsible for polluting our rivers and not in fact the Dairy industry is truly astounding propaganda and we must salute Big Dairy because the utter falsehood of their position borders on the nakedly malicious.
Big Oil Exploration Propaganda:
Big Oil knew back in the 1990s that oil pollution caused climate change and they responded by funding quack science to seed denial in the mind of the public using the same tactic Big Tobacco used pretending smoking didn’t cause cancer so these maggots are unspeakable when it comes to selling their lies and deceit.
Here’s the one cold terrifying fact you need to keep in mind with Big Oil. Over 50% of the current global emissions that are pushing us towards catastrophic climate change were caused in the last 25 years, that’s since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.
Right now Big Oil are running propaganda to spook NZers into turning against the Government’s ban on future exploration with a pack of lies claiming the end of Western Civilisation if we go ahead with the ban.
The truth of course is that none of their propaganda even mentions the cost of catastrophic climate change, we are banning future exploration because there is NO future in it. They bray it will cost billions if we shut them down, the reality of course is that we won’t have anything left if we don’t shut them down.
Big Oil are the worst combination of pimp and dealer with unspeakable power. Their ethics would make your average drug cartel blush.
China meltdown is Jacinda’s fault Propaganda:
As I blogged this week, if I were China and I wanted to spin crap, I’d hire Matthew Hooton who amazingly had a column out claiming Winston was driving us away from China the week before it started to cascade out. This was all communicated in a Newspaper who earlier this year was busted promoting Chinese Government propaganda and has a journalist like Fran O’Sullivan who has been whipping up the China hysteria while not pointing out that she is a member of the New Zealand China council.
This has been whipped up by journalists and pundits who are very good friends with China to blame Jacinda for geopolitical tensions formed well beyond our borders. Yes there is a problem with China AND America, no it is not Jacinda’s fault – it is National’s for passing the TICS legislation and it’s for a 5G network that is bullshit anyway.
This is about corporate profit margins and vested Chinese interests, it’s not Winston or Jacinda’s fault yet most Kiwis have been led to believe that it is.
Landlord & Boss Propaganda:
Despite NZ being ranked as the most business friendly environment in the world to do business, no one screams louder in anguish and pain than bosses and landlords when their exploitation is ever challenged.
Look at the manufactured hysteria the workplace relations law inspired …
Workplace relations law finally passed after tortured journey
The Government finally passed its flagship workplace relations bill after months of consternation, ending 90-day trials for large businesses.The bill was twice softened by Labour’s coalition partner NZ First – first before it was introduced and then before the second reading.
The behind-the-scenes controversy over the bill spilled out into the public arena in August and September when NZ First MP Shane Jones criticised parts of it on Q+A and leader Winston Peters described it as a “work in progress”. This led to unions writing directly to Peters asking him to back down.
…the National Party and their Boss mates whipped this toothless lapdog up as the first shots in some communist revolution that would see a socialist apocalypse unleashed on the mums and dads of NZ.
The Workplace relations law was always a watered down meaningless bit of nothing that simply took the Union movement back 10 years to before National had stripped them bare. There isn’t anything modern or empowering about this legislation, it is a whitewash lip service to the union moment to look like something has been done when really very little has changed. The established Unions will have the same monopoly they’ve always enjoyed while the vast majority of workers receive very little in terms of empowerment. The Government may as well have done nothing. Total victory to the business community for manufacturing a threat out of this mirage.
While bosses scream communism all the time, SlumLords threaten rent increases at the drop of a hat when ever they are forced to upgrade their substandard living conditions.
Here is a list, according to NZ Landlords, that will inspire rent rises…
1 – The Sun coming up
2 – Full moons
3 – Birds flying
4 – Gravity
5 – Female leaders
CGT Propoganda:
The naked self interest on display over the CGT is perhaps the most beautiful example of fear mongering by those who have so much. With the majority of our Politicians and pundits likely to be impacted by this tax, every threat from the known universe will impact us if we attempt to make the tax system more fair by implementing a CGT.
There is the slumlord who owns 80 properties threatening his tenants, there is the TV pundit threatening the same thing, and Simon Bridges who owns 4 properties tells us the very essence of the NZ way of life is threatened.
Really? A capital gains tax is a threat to the NZ way of life?
That’s funny because I always thought the ‘Kiwi way of life’ was a low imagination horizon anti intellectualism based on exploitation of confiscated indigenous resources where ignorance & malice is celebrated by the rural volk while middle class attention is engulfed between school rankings & property speculation.
I kinda like anything that might threaten that malaise of selfishness.
These propaganda campaigns are so successful because mainstream media empower them and because New Zealander’s are easy to manipulate using negative egalitarianism.
The fear that someone else is getting something you are not rots the noble roots of solidarity forged out of a self-reliance on these lonely isles. ‘You think your better than me’ sits on our shoulder and whispers bitterness that lashes out at anyone being helped when there is no one to walk the path with us.
The most petty of angels spites our judgement.
If we had current affairs shows that forced us to think rather than whatever the fuck Seven Sharp and The Project do, we would question more, but when our collective intellectual curiosity is at the level of the ZM and Edge Breakfast shows, we are doomed to be willingly led.
Bloody good piece of research here Martyn,
You should get an award for digging all the truth out here.
NZ is now just another hollowed out sold off piece of global property where successive Governments have allowed the world to take our country from us.
Will Jacinda stop the continuing plunder of our last vestiges of our once proud life and public assets and our former world heritage natural places?
Has she been captured by the global cabal?
Great television cartoon.
Television has served as an excellent medium for big business to churn out propaganda to the masses, especially since the deregulation of the mid-to-late 1980s.
A man came to NZ and said “I don’t want to see New Zealanders become tenants in their own land” then he opened the country up to sell it; he was a liar and he was our last elected prime minister; – his name was John Key.
John Key =Landlord & Boss of Propaganda:
What he really mean’t was “I don’t want to see New Zealanders become tenants in their own land, I want them to be homeless and in prison unable to vote against power interests that benefit people like me, financial traders turned Politicians to keep the cash rolling in”
and key worked for Allan Greenspan. hand picked rogue and dutiful slave of that mob.
Merchant Banker = Say one thing and do the opposite, lead everyone into a false sense of security, he had an extremely silky tongue. I guess he has read a lot of books on mind control and human pyschology ?
The PR industry is based on understanding of the psychology of conscious and unconscious influences on peoples thinking and feeling.
Strategies have been experimented with and refined over the decades, first successfully applied to advertising then a wider political agenda.
Hills and Knowlton worked with Big Tobacco from 1953 to 1968, has offices on more than 80 countries, successfully changed US public opinion dramatically to allow Bush to invade iraq in 1991.
“Hill & Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam’s army marched into Kuwait, the Emir’s government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration………”
https://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html
Hills and Knowlton works with the CIA directly.
Also the infamous firm has many connections with NZ govt across various parties ,and is employed from time to time by NZ govts.
Observations
https://quoteunquotenz.blogspot.com/2011/08/hill-knowlton-is-evil-sequel.html
http://thejackalman.blogspot.com/2011/08/john-key-on-letterman.html
john key is usually a slick and secretive operator but the connection is not difficult to associate with the NACT campaigns to privatise public assets even when a referendum shows an overwhelming opinion against it. PR was needed to shape the words and approach to privatise anyway on a false mandate.
With expert PR help, they got away with it. The people of NZ lost and will continue to loose on every monthly bill. Billions given from Kiwis to off shore investors on an ongoing basis
Similarly the escalation of house prices has meant private banks have had a bonanza in the absence of effective mortgage control, the open market for international buyers, deliberately increased immigration and all the while a PR line that nothing is wrong – there is no housing crisis.
Rural land similarly has been ramped up with off shore based corporate ownership and bankers managing farm stocking through bankers advisory services holding a gun to the heads of farmers.
Cunningly property prices are not taken into account when inflation targets are calculated, nor the consumer price index. Wages don’t move with property prices yet we have seen property prices escalate rapidly over 20 odd years to many times what they were when compared with the average wage.
The 5 odd billion banks were unsuccessful in hiding so shown as profit this year, is the tip of an iceberg.
The banking bonanza over some decades has effectively taken many tens of billions away from Kiwis who now struggle to find a roof overhead in a very distorted economy.
Inflation has been rife yet not recognised officially. This inflation is not wage driven nor involved the meagre wage rises. We are a much poorer nation as a result.
Banking is a protected privileged parasitic drain on every Kiwi, every household and small business, the national economic structure and allowing this defies common sense.
There is not an attack on banking from any political party as they are controlled.
In the 1930s the then recently established Reserve Bank Of NZ printed money to build state houses, and that move was pivotal in getting NZ on its feet after and crippling offshore based depression.
The same should be done today and private bankers regulate to a position where they cannot do what they have done to NZ again.
You may have noticed john key is now head of Westpac NZ. Coincidence???
The four big private banks in NZ have common investors the bulk of which are off shore entities.
Big money and corruption directly and indirectly of public good.
Bomber great work with this blog.
Is there any possibility you could come back on air with Watea news.?
I know you did not get funding and weren’t going to from the establishment that was obvious but at least you gave it a go.
Maybe float the idea and see if you can get support.
We need a hard hitting , truthful factual platform that can reach out beyond the T.D.B that already does a fantastic job.
There are so many committed people who contribute on this site and deserve to be heard above the utter crap that is masquerading as current affairs.
There has to be a forum available that has a chance in reaching the mainstream.
The topics and contributions that make the T.D.B are issues we need to address beyond the tripe we are fed every day.
Again great work Bomber.
Totally agree Mosa, bring back Watea news, maybe try crowd funding?
What I find weird is that we have a left wing government that has spent years going on about helping the poorest and healthy homes, (in my view obsessional because it was based around having little to zero understanding of what occurs for beneficiaries and the working poor aka at present the issue is rental shortages and income vs living expenses, not quality of rentals which is more a wokie issue that housing is not good enough for them, so essentially government policy has a real likelihood of making rental shortages more chronic while making it illegal for anyone to provide alternate housing because it won’t meet the standards).
So when it comes down to it, the government and the so called community providers are given a free pass on the poorest tenants under the state who are allowed not meet the healthy home standard for 2 years after everyone else….
I hear the new builds are tying to get a acceptation too…
Like Kiwibuild it makes a mockery of the Greens and Labour housing policy that seems to alienate as many voters as possible (cheered on by MSM and the right), with Green/Labour constant mantra on beneficiaries and working poor then ignores or gives them worse outcomes with Kiwibuild and healthy homes which they have being obsessing about for about a decade keeping them out of power.
The government seem incapable of working out like all their other pet projects they support the Natz on aka unitary plan, TPPA, assets sell offs to private interests aka Kiwibuild and immigration rorts that it is raising the cost of housing and lowering the wages and getting less and less taxes into the country when the Ponzi bursts…
So like the Natz they can pretend it is the landlords that are the biggest evil (even thought there seems to be a landlord shortage and the biggest landlord of the poor and community providers seem to be the government and worst offenders on the quality side… )
The worst examples of deaths and poverty seem to occur in the state house and community rentals.. . but they won’t meet the standard until 2023…. meanwhile private rentals are 2021?
Compliance timeline for the new standards:
• 1 July 2021 – From this date, private landlords must ensure that their rental properties comply with the healthy home standards within 90 days of any new tenancy.
• 1 July 2021 – All boarding houses must comply with the healthy home standards.
• 1 July 2023 – All Housing New Zealand houses and registered Community Housing Providers houses must comply with the healthy home standards.
• 1 July 2024 – All rental homes must comply with the healthy home standards.
I point this out, because Labour have had this obsession for years about housing and privatisation keeping them out of power for nearly a decade because the average home owner can see the discrepansy.
Now the Greens with similar discourses making housing their mantra too have been haemorrhaging voters… but the government still want to believe the right wingers are right, the wokies are right and somehow magical thinking is going to get all these increasingly poorer people into quality housing and turn their lives around with cash to burn, while the government drags it’s feet the most on helping the state house tenants and laughably the community providers too last to upgrades to healthy homes…
When the Natz bring it up, instead of blaming them, blame the government for thinking being hypocrites on housing is ok again and again…
To put in perspective the evils of poor quality housing… apparently $145m a YEAR of social costs from poor housing is the similar to just one shipment of Meth in one DAY aka $136m caught in NZ https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/383318/poor-housing-conditions-costing-taxpayers-more-than-145m
.”Customs said the seizure had prevented more than $136m worth of social harm to New Zealand communities, based on the NZ Drug Harm Index.”
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/383309/two-arrests-over-meth-loaded-guns-found-in-shipping-container
Air pollution costs 5 billion per year and Auckland Waterfront has been found guilty of breeching the sulphur dioxide multiple times but still the Auckland council is stealing the harbour to allow more cruise ships which are huge air (and other) polluters to come to NZ!
Harm and economic statistics seems be very politically motivated and reported in NZ but the government policy does not seem to clamp down on those who are well connected in NZ but more use selected statistics to take tax payer money and enrich certain sectors such as construction while pretending it is to prevent harm to the community or ignoring the harm the that industry does to the community,…
+100 SAVENZ…well said
….any long term secure house, even if it leaks and has draughts….is better than living impermanently in a car, or a garage, or a motel( racking up the debts and worry stress), or in an unaffordable rental, or under a bush, or on a park bench, or on someone’s sofa, or in someone’s spare room , or in someone’s shed …until they get sick of you
….think about what this insecurity is doing to our New Zealand children
Labour and the Greens ( authoritarian punitive woke) have their priorities wrong
…people need affordable secure housing, space and privacy first ( we used to have this in New Zealand….where has it gone?)
… and if they can not afford their own house ,then long term state housing must be provided and affordable rentals first
… quality comes second…and quality depends on affordability( both to the landlord and the tenant…many NZ landlords are not rich, nor are they rack renters and they vote Labour !…a warning!)
( when I was a kid I was alarmed when I thought my mother was talking to my father about a giraffe coming through the crack in our charming old turn of the century house ; I couldnt see this giraffe myself, nor could I see her logic , nor was I disturbed by the brisk nor ‘westerly breeze coming through…this was normal for a house; but where was this giraffe’s eye?…why was it trying to get into our house? and how was it going to get through that small crack?!…even the fairyland frosts on the inside of the windows in winter were a delight…because they were viewed from inside a lovely spacious aesthetic secure house, with a beautiful garden)
@RED BUZZARD , yes many people ‘forget’ that entire generations were raised in these now woke deemed dangerous villa’s, marae’s and state houses!!!
Many of that generation seem healthier than today’s! It’s not the housing that is the issue as we can see by the statistics above, Neoliberalism in particular privatisation of state housing, bad trade agreements and Meth is far more dangerous for a start but there are neoliberal economics for concentrating on pretending many old houses are dangerous and thus making many people homeless and allowing foreign investment, construction subsidies, and getting rid of RMA , resource consent and building standards for more profits.
The actual cost of bad housing in very small compared to many other areas and you wonder how much of that is not the housing but homelessness that makes the costs up!
With climate change we are building poor housing that is not designed to withstand climate changes so that every time there is a natural disaster or more flooding etc we lose more and more existing housing that could be prevented by concentrating on that now.
SaveNZ:
>> yes many people ‘forget’ that entire generations were raised in these now woke deemed dangerous villa’s, marae’s and state houses!!!
You seem to be forgetting that those buildings weren’t as old when those generations were being raised in them. All built infrastructure degrades over time, as the strength of their materials is broken down by weather. If water starts getting inside through under-maintained roofs or walls, this can cause a house to become an unlivable, rotting mess, very quickly. On top of that, houses experience a lot of wear and tear from people living in them every day. If services like wiring and plumbing are not actively maintained, this can also cause damage to the fabric of the house, and make them dangerous to live in.
When my daughter’s mother got pregnant in the late 1990s, we were living in a falling down old house with some other childless young folk; students, artists, activists, and so on. It was freezing in winter, and the roof leaked when it rained, but the rent was very cheap, and the landlord left us alone to decorate and modify the house as we saw fit. At that stage of life, it suited our needs. When my daughter’s mother fell down one of the holes in the floor while heavily pregnant, we realized it was time to upgrade.
That this quality of housing has become normal for a growing number of kiwi families is shameful, and that landlords charge them full market rents to live in these hovels is scandalous. The housing warrant of fitness is long overdue, and if it leads to slumlords selling off their landbanked houses to landlords who can bring them up to standard, or to first home-owners, so much the better. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The TV toon – lyrics straight from Dead Kennedys Frankenchrist album – MTV get off the air track. Hope Jello is okay with this?
This should be compulsory viewing in ever secondary school in NZ as well as prime time.
Business NZ will stop any discussion on action to change the status quo, unless it is about more deregulation, the need to privatise more and the lies about benefits to a few of exploiting the environment.
Business NZ controls NZ, not Kiwis nor Govts. MSM is controlled by private interests.
RNZ spouts ridiculous Anglo/US propaganda every day without any balance of time being spent reviewing the international fact finding showing what a the program of deliberate lying looks like.
Reports on Venezuela are an example of unbalances lies and fabrications used to destabilise Kiwi opinion prior to a military attack on a freely elected Govt.
We suffered the same with RNZ propagating lies about about Iraq, prior to NZ sending Kiwi soldiers to assist with the murder campaign where over 1.4 million people died, killed by bombs and invading forces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGf4maDU7Ps&feature=youtu.be
The puppets in RNZ need to be weeded out, named and disgraced for what they are, traitors to the Kiwi public who pay for state radio.
NZ state radio doing the work of US deep state global tyranny and the Treachery of Business NZ and their offshore transnational investor networks.
Unfortunately, I agree about RNZ National. 6.20 am every morning they broadcast propaganda from BBC, CNN etc It’s also interesting that this dodgy material is not available for re-hearing to critique because of BBC /RNZ contract…. Shocking and totally unacceptable, Clare…. Clare…. oh wait. … RNZ has turned to .. Sad.
Fatal Flaw In Climate Change Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYoOcaqCzxo
“We must stop pollution for reasons of biosphere toxicity, NOT because of climate change. The TSI model of solar forcing ignores nearly all climate forcing aspects of space weather AND applies that forcing to the human total”.
DEMAND THAT NOAA AND THE IPCC:
(1) USE ‘PARTICLE FORCING’ AND EXPAND SOLAR DATA TO INCLUDE X-RAYS, SOLAR WIND, AND HIGH-ENERGY PROTONS.
(2) CEASE OF DECEPTIVE PRACTICES LIKE ONLY SHOWING SPRING SNOW COVER, AND NOT ‘COUNTING’ SOLAR PHYSICISTS AS ‘CLIMATE SCIENTISTS’ IN THEIR “97%” ANALYSIS.
(3) STOP PRETENDING CLIMATE CHANGE BEGAN IN 1850, THERE IS ROBUST DATA GOING WELL INTO THE PAST.
Rickoshay, my understanding is that xrays, solar wind, and high energy protons do not affect our climate. Please point to data that states otherwise. Those particles you listed are trapped by Earth’s magnetosphere high above our atmosphere.
Red herring?
See the Cloud Mystery Utube
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/02/21/cosmic-rays-increasing-for-the-4th-year-in-a-row/
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author and social commentator on the Extinction Rebellion being the last opportunity to avoid extinction [of the human species, along with most others].
‘There is one desperate chance left to thwart the impending ecocide and extinction of the human species. We must, in wave after wave, carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measures to halt carbon emissions by 2025 and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. If we do not do this, we will face mass death…..’
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/extinction-rebellion/
AFKTT
It will take more than elites being forced to tell the truth.
They cannot do that, as it is not in their self serving greed and fear driven perspective of self interest. Fear of change drives them to even more desperate parasitism to gather more from the community that the feed off.
Relying on them to change is indicative of how insecure and powerless common folk feel when they submit to the structures that allow elites to emerge and then dominate the narrative. They are few in number, rely on the rest to support them, yet successfully command what is done.
Breaking the mindset that allows that is where possible survival chances lie.
Small changes can accumulate towards progress in perceived chances of survival but any small or large changes must have outcomes towards goals that are rational and long term. Many changes put forward by political figures amount to feel good greenwash.
The structural shift humans cannot avoid if survival of a small population is to be possible, involves a radical change of lifestyles, widely accepted values and binding adherence to a mantra of common good with immediate and long term restoration of environment as a first priority. The “economy” that elites control has nothing to do with it.
Climate change due to pollution is an outcome of consumption of Non Renewable Natural Resources (NRNR). Fossil fuels are a part of that but not the whole of it.
Cement production, paints, plastics, most machinery, cars, our modern houses, cities, highways and a raft of other environmental catastrophies, just will not go on they way they have unchecked. Industrialisation is slowing towards decline and the sooner the better for the environment.
It is not a matter of what suits the human mindset, which has shown itself to be a toxic agent to this biosphere. Humans numbers are well past overshoot.
Population reduction is a simple policy adopted by one country only.
That was put in place out of necessity but as a response to intelligent thinking and planning. China leads the world in that to date but China’s initiative is dated and does not take into account the impending gobal collapse of resource caused by human kind.
During the last 2 months there has been news items about two countries giving incentives for having children. Crazy stuff. The elites of course want more consumers and shudder at the though of a shrinking “economy”. Blind stupidity and selfish fear coupled with an ignorant uncaring regards for any future generations or the environment.
Extinction rebellion may help put a brake on elite parasitism but only in a minor way. Occupy Wall Street came and went and nothing changes, regulations and laws were tightened against expression of thought against elite opportunism and demonstrations but no progress in making meaning full change.
The education system would serve humankind better if more radical and honest learning about critical thinking, social and environmental consequences of present hegemony were openly discussed. The corruption of education is not accidental.
Avoidance of desperation driven and revolutionary uprising is carefully managed by the elites. MSM is a powerful tool and PR expertise in controlling mass mood is a well established methodology based on much of what has been learned in psychology.
Top down structures allow elites a niche to establish control. Wealth concentration allowed by money and banking have been fundamental contributors in wrecking the planet as a habitable place for many species.
Humans can do well with cooperative structures that have little or no hierarchy.
Education and a set of environmental values must dominate over the conservative fears of change.
Humans kind did live simpler lives in smaller numbers and the critical factor the extent of energy harvesting and use was in check, so restricting the consumption of resources.
We have to harvest and use less energy and change how we live to operate on a low energy low resource consumption way of living.
Cites have a limited time ahead.
Hi John. I agree. The ‘elites’ won’t tell the truthy. They can’t. That would amount to an admission they’ve been lying for so long. I linked the Chris Hedges article as an example of how desperate the times we live in are.
I don’t see any change towards sustainability: quite the reverse in fact. So it’s very much a matter of how long the energy supply will remain affordable (or available) and how fast the environment will collapse.
I’m getting too old (coming up to 69) for the heavy physical stuff now and am in the process of trying to exit the property I developed in preparation for the economic meltdown (that still has not arrived)…with little success at this stage because the mainstream culture is so remote from reality, and most people are still very mainstream.
I have known about much of what you have written for a long as 30 years, and it has done me no good -much harm even because I put time and money in the wrong places.
What globalism is really doing, not just making westerner workers poorer but also the eastern workers…. even worse they are forced away from their families…
blaming housing and taxes for poverty wages is just another way to encourage the rise of multinational business… how can any NZ business compete with 50 cents an hour when even those workers in Asia can’t survive on it….
This is what free trade is really about, exploitation and a race to the bottom… in every way, in every country!!!
Workers making clothes for Australian brands can’t afford to eat, Oxfam reports
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/feb/25/australian-fashion-brand-workers-earning-51-cents-an-hour-oxfam-reports?CMP=soc_567&fbclid=IwAR11unEAtBn7aW78DGQayHjnKf2aN-riWH6hbjXIyEkGa264u7Jml8ePfs0
Another Kiwi construction company that’s been in business for years going under… in the race to the bottom with dysfunction in the industry and high building prices with low quality for consumers here and money being wasted on lawyers and lawsuits instead of the old days when builders did their job and it was not about accountants and lawyers and third party subcontractors for every step in building with the actual building quality and workers being the last consideration…
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/business/383598/arrow-international-goes-into-voluntary-administration
https://mailchi.mp/e19d7f26aec2/matt-ridley-the-rise-of-fake-science
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