JAMES SHAW APOLOGISES TO ROD DONALD AND JEANETTE FITZSIMONS

1. I’ve been saying for a very long time that the Greens are worse than useless (they actively promote Planetary Meltdown!).

   We just get confirmation of their worse-than-uselessness every week. Sometimes every day.

   I did try working with them 16-18 years ago* but soon gave up because I found them disorganised and off-track.

   Since then it’s all been downhill.

   People interested in such things speculate that TPTB have set it up that way to siphon the environmental voters back into the mainstream. I don’t think that would be necessary because the level of ignorance, incompetence and disorganisation would alone render the Greens impotent.

   The best thing hat could happen is that they disappear from the political scene at the coming election and make room for a genuine environmental party.

   On the other hand, it’s probably too late the save the environment anyway, after two decades of trough-feeding and pissing into the wind by the Greens.

   *Atmospheric CO2 was around 370 ppm in the early 2000s. It’s now around 412 ppm, up about 42 ppm.

   Arctic Sea ice was largely intact in the early 2000s. Now it’s almost gone.

   Thanks for nothing, Greens, National, Labour, NZF, ACT…..

   https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg

   • Afewknow – Interesting. Ever since they jettisoned great Sue Bradford, I’ve wondered a bit about what might have been going on in the Greens.

     • Sue jettisoned herself because she did not get the co-leaders role!

   • Finally someone who sees all the politicians how I do.
     All a bunch of useless wankers.
     I do find the greens particularly odious though, simply because of how sanctimonious they are combined with their fucked up wokery.

   • When each NZ Resident is but 1 in each 1560 People currently alive on Planet Earth does anyone seriously think we can change Diddley Squat except maybe by setting examples???
     Was heartening to read somewhere the other day that Aotearoa’s Fertility Rate has fallen well under 2.4 Children per Couple. Think I saw now around 1.69 or thereabouts.
     Now THAT is what Gaia needs. Cause going from 1 billion in 1800 to 2.5 billions in 1950 to 7.8 billions in 2020 and still Rising IS the underlying cause of Eco Destruction AND Climate Change..
     What the Greens and all the “Woke” refuse to Acknowledge is that it’s our Numbers and Consumption that are the Problem! Doesn’t get them Votes or Funding.
     When Aotearoa stops the Crazy Immigration of the Worlds unskilled Poor which undercuts our own Poor, holds Wages Low and Rents High etc, that might upset the Elites who Cry Out for it but would benefit the Rest of Us.
     What is the point of more “Growth” except to enrich some and cover our beautiful Land over with Concrete, Tarmac and Subdivisions?
     And if we ever let our Population trend down and replace Drudgery with Technology, better Pay and Living Conditions, with less but higher educated, trained and skilled Kiwis having more Equitable shares of our Massive National Wealth then, maybe then, we could hold ourselves Up as a Beacon of what’s Possible to REALLY Address Climate Change.
     Instead of all the current, worse than useless, Virtue Signaling…

     • Toomuchofnothing.
       A very important discussion usually blindsided with irrelevant claptrap that avoids the issue of limiting reproduction and shrinking populations.
       We never did need over seas workers.
       Over the last 3 generation we have moved a greater part of our population into work and working hours have grown longer.
       Not so long ago families had one paid worker and yet still managed to buy a house and bring up a family.

       The changes have been within the economy to produce more profit for the few, burn more fuel and Non Renewable Natural Resources s0 producing more waste.
       The reduction in fertility should not only be encouraged but be mandatory.
       Other countries have to come to grips with their excessive breeding programs. Taking a part of their surplus sends completely the wrong signal.
       Meanwhile the planet is forgotten.

2. By the way, not that many people are interested in reality or the future:

   ‘New Zealand experiences warmest winter on record

   Season in 2020 was 1.14C above average, with 17 locations setting record-breaking mean temperatures’

   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/03/new-zealand-experiences-warmest-winter-on-record

3. Hands up who came here because they wanted Chloe installed as co-leader of the Greens at the last vote.

   • Hand = up.

4. Clever parody, Uncle Albert/admiral halsey would be one of McCartneys most underrated songs by the way

5. How’s about apologizing to NZ taxpayers David?

   It’s their money!

6. Great Parody.
   Helped with the morning’s house work.

7. Not sure that these aren’t cheap shots, Chris. The Green school is a stand alone issue, and probably out of focus – it’s suited some of us to over-simplify it. Just for fun- an alternative way of expressing our anger at them – cheaper than tomato throwing.

   Long term Green supporters betrayed by New Zealand’s only environmental party, dumped it bit by bit before this latest petit bourgeois circus. We wearied of their identity politics, their racism, their anti- white male-ism. Too much of this was girls’ night out chatter, not befitting political party leadership. The crunch came when brown green women decided to cash in on the monstrous Muslim tragedy and tell the world that Pakeha were to blame, and thus perpetuated the evil of that terrible day.

   The rich are of no concern to me, many are perfectly pleasant people.It is the hurting poor, and the hurting planet, and the crippled future, that have been let down, and left searching for a voice.

   • +1

   • ‘The rich are of no concern to me,’

     Perhaps the rich should be of concern to you, since they are the ones who game the system at everyone else’s expense, and are the main reason most people are not rich and why a large portion of the population are very poor.

     Of course, being in privilege positions and able to control the flow of money and siphon off a portion, the rich blame the poor for their lack of wealth.

     The following was written for Americans, living in the land of extraordinary greed and extraordinary disparity between top and bottom, but much of it applies to NZ.

     SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

     In the Worst of Times, the Billionaire Elite Plunder Working Class America

     by NICK BAKER FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

     Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

     In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before.

     Since March, more than 58 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment. The Internal Revenue Service now predicts that the U.S. economy will have almost 40 million fewer jobs in 2021 than they predicted before the pandemic, as a result of the prolonged economic depression. As it becomes widely recognized that the economy is not going to “bounce right back” into full activity – even when coronavirus cases do eventually decline – and that the current depression will continue for a long time, companies are doing anything they can to drive their stock prices higher.

     Desperate to maintain their profits, many large corporations are planning massive layoffs and acknowledging that currently furloughed workers are not going to have jobs to come back to. The Wall Street Journal reports that a recent study found, “nearly half of U.S. employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.” The companies say low-paid workers will be the first to be cut.

     Twice as many workers had their pay cut by July 1 as during the Bush-Obama recession that began in 2009, according to the Washington Post. More than 10 million private sector workers have had their wages cut or been forced to work part-time.

     Car company Tesla forced all workers to take a 10 percent pay cut from mid-April until July. In the same period, Tesla stock skyrocketed, and CEO Elon Musk’s net worth has now quadrupled from $25 billion to over $100 billion. Business software company Salesforce announced record sales levels one day and layoffs of 1,000 workers the next. The company’s stock rose 26 percent.

     Among small businesses, another study found that 50 percent of all small-business employees who were furloughed since March are still without work. Twenty-eight percent are still furloughed; 22 percent have been permanently laid off. Even in the government’s rigged and severely undercounted unemployment statistics, the number of people who have been unemployed 15-26 weeks is nearly double what it was at the height of the 2009 recession — and exponentially higher than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

     The “stimulus” bills signed by Trump and passed by Democrats have already given away trillions to major corporations and tens of billions in tax cuts to the richest Americans. Even two-thirds of the original set of supposedly “small-business”-focused Paycheck Protection Program loans went to large corporations, such as Ritz Carlton, while gifting billions in fees to the banks that distributed the loans.

     While millions of low-wage workers, “many of whom work in service jobs in hard-hit industries such as hospitality, travel and retail…have lost jobs, been furloughed or seen their hours cut,” writes the Wall Street Journal, “the livelihoods of white-collar professionals…have remained largely intact.”

     The super-rich are getting richer than ever

     On August 18 — a day when 1,349 people died of COVID-19 and tens of millions were unemployed — the S&P 500 stock index hit an all-time record high with the tech-focused Nasdaq 100 index already well into record territory. Financial newspapers announced a new “bull market,” predicting that stock prices would only go higher.

     The runaway success of the stock market in the present context has come as a shock to many people. Barely two weeks before stocks reached an all-time high, the United States announced the largest 3-month fall in the economy since the Great Depression. Even calling it the largest doesn’t quite capture the magnitude. The 9.5 percent contraction from April to June was four times larger than the previous largest drop since World War II.

     Economies around the world are in freefall. The GDP of the OECD countries, the world’s largest economies, fell almost 10 percent in the same period — also four times greater than in the 2009 global collapse — and global GDP is expected to decrease by 5 percent this year, a historic amount. Yet the stock market blithely rushes along, as the mega-rich try to squeeze the last drops they can out of it, ahead of the abyss.

     Bloomberg News reports that the 500 richest people in the world have increased their wealth by $871 billion so far this year, though “the surge in wealth is especially concentrated in the upper ranks of the billionaires index.” During the week of August 24–28 alone, the world’s 500 wealthiest people increased their wealth by $209 billion. The world’s 10 richest billionaires now collectively have more than $1 trillion.

     Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world by a wide margin, now boasts personal wealth of $204.6 billion, as of August 26. His riches largely come from Amazon stock, which has risen 80 percent so far this year. Bezos’s wealth has nearly doubled during the pandemic, including one single day in which he made $13 billion.

     Historical estimates vary, but most agree that John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are the only U.S. tycoons who have ever had more money, adjusted for inflation, than Jeff Bezos now has.

     The largest stock gains this year have gone to the largest companies, especially in tech, as the pandemic and the economic collapse have become a boon for monopoly capitalism. Tech monopoly Apple is now the world’s most valuable company, with its total stock worth over $2 trillion — the first company ever to reach that mark — having increased by $1 trillion in just 21 weeks.

     The secret to Apple’s incredible success? It has engaged in the largest stock buybacks in history, re-purchasing $360 billion of its own stock since 2012, according to the New York Times. This self-enrichment tactic inflates the value of a company’s stock by buying it back from shareholders, thus giving money directly to the shareholders by the tens and hundreds of billions and enriching them further by decreasing the number of remaining shares available for investors to buy — driving up the share price.

     Apple has spent $141 billion on buybacks in the past two years alone, after Trump’s 2017 tax cuts enabled the company to return to the U.S. tax-free $252 billion in profits. Apple had held the money in tax havens for years, explicitly refusing to pay taxes and claiming that, if returned to the U.S., the money would be used to “create” tens of thousands of jobs — but that they wouldn’t do it if they had to pay taxes. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act removed the repatriation tax on the same false premise, and, once returned, the money was used for its intended purpose all along and given straight to the company’s millionaire and billionaire shareholders. One of those billionaires is the company’s CEO Tim Cook — though his wealth of $1 billion is rather pitiful by ruling class standards.

     Other tech monopolies like Microsoft and Google have also seen enormous increases. Both Amazon and Microsoft are on pace to join Apple at the $2 trillion level later this year. The only other publicly traded company in the world that comes close is Saudi ARAMCO, the Saudi Arabian state oil and gas company. By comparison, the total stock of Walmart, by far the world’s largest company by revenue — i.e., actual products made and sold — is worth $370 billion.

     Giving the lie to this wild stock rally, corporate profits fell almost 25% through the first half of 2020, despite consumer spending – the overwhelming majority of the U.S. economy – being heavily propped up by the $600 unemployment supplement, near-zero interest rates, and to a lesser extent the $1200 stimulus checks. The unemployment supplement effectively replaced the lost wages of unemployed workers, enabling them to continue making needed purchases, while low interest rates have fueled a spending bonanza for the wealthy who have been largely unscathed by the economic depression.

     These overheated and entirely fictitious stock market gains are the reason that CEOs, leading shareholders and corporate executives have dumped more than $50 billion in stock since May. CNN notes that these “insiders,” as they are known, “are privy to more information about the true health of their companies than average investors. And if they were confident in the market rally, insiders would be unlikely to sell now.”

     With the unemployment supplement ending and no future stimulus checks announced, spending by the wealthy alone will not be enough the maintain the façade covering an economy in the midst of an historic collapse.

     Working class suffers while the rich splurge

     “The recession is over for the rich, but the working class is far from recovered,” wrote the Washington Post on August 18. Less than half – 42 percent – of jobs lost during the pandemic have returned, with workers in low-wage jobs being the least likely to be back working. People of color and women have fared worst. Women make up two thirds of those employed in the 40 lowest-paid jobs, with women of color making up the majority of low-paid workers.

     “Black men and women have recovered about 20 percent of the jobs they lost in the pandemic,” reports the Post, while white men and women have recovered 40 and 45 percent of their lost jobs, respectively. Between February and May 2020, 11 million jobs held by women have disappeared. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that “one in five working-age adults is unemployed because COVID-19 upended their child-care arrangements,” with women three times more likely than men to have to leave their jobs – and up to five times more likely to decrease their work hours – to take care of children. The losses in the workplace that women are facing today will be felt for decades.

     Some 30–50 million people in the U.S. are at risk of eviction in the coming months, as temporary eviction protections end. In a recent U.S. Census Bureau survey, “nearly half of Hispanic renters and 42 percent of Black renters said they had ‘no confidence’ or only ‘slight confidence’ they could pay their August rent,” the article states.

     At the same time, food prices are rising at the fastest rate in nearly 50 years, making meat and eggs unaffordable for many. The price of beef alone is up 25 percent this year. The same Census Bureau survey found that “20 percent of Hispanic households with children and nearly a quarter of Black households with children say they don’t have enough to eat.”

     The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 27 million people in the U.S. have lost their health insurance during the pandemic.

     While tens of millions of working-class people struggle, starve, and are constantly threatened and harassed by their landlords, record-low interest rates are fueling huge spending sprees for the wealthy. Mortgage interest rates are at the lowest in U.S. history, leading to record levels of house purchases by those who have no financial worries. Car sales, too, are benefiting from low interest rates. “Some dealerships have had their best July ever,” reports the Post. Needless to say, these cars are not part of the miles-long lines at drive-up food banks.

     Though tens of millions are now jobless, retail sales have returned to pre-pandemic levels, with massive gains going to big box stores such as Target, Walmart, and Home Depot, which are seeing their largest sales in history. Meanwhile 100,000 small businesses closed permanently by mid-May and estimates are that hundreds of thousands more will not survive the pandemic and the burgeoning economic depression, putting additional millions of workers out of work.

     As the small businesses close, the Walmarts and Targets move in to take their place. This is part of the process by which capitalism translates catastrophe into “opportunity,” accelerating its tendency towards monopoly and consolidating the marketplace into fewer and fewer hands in a desperate search for higher profits.

     Fed prints shovelfuls of money for the rich

     The Federal Reserve Bank has been constantly printing money and forking it over to the rich. In the last economic collapse, under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the total amount came to over $29 trillion. No doubt the final accounting this time around will leave that number far behind.

     The August 18 New York Times, noting the ever-widening economic gap between capitalists and workers, says that the Federal Reserve has no plans to stop driving piles of cash to the rich anytime soon. “The Fed has started new programs to buy Treasury bonds and other financial assets to calm investors, and is financing those programs by essentially creating new money,” writes the Times.

     At the beginning of the crisis, the Fed instantly bought $3 trillion of the Treasury and corporate bonds, largely in the form of buying huge amounts of corporate debt from major companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, AT&T and Visa. These large purchases of debt by the Fed both fund the companies and drive down the cost of issuing debt for the companies.

     While the Federal Reserve Bank has a program to lend to small and medium-sized businesses, called the Main Street Lending Program, it has made almost no loans to these companies. Of the $600 billion earmarked for the program, only $92 million – 0.015% – has been loaned. This is because the commercial banks who set up the loans and keep a small percentage while selling the rest to the Fed, are not interested in making small, near-zero-interest loans to small businesses with almost no expected profit and a greater downside if the small companies go under. The banks would much rather be using their funds to make enormous, higher-interest, much more profitable loans to massive corporations in need of large amounts of debt to get themselves through the economic crisis.

     In this way, the natural profit-driven mechanics of capitalism ensure that larger companies crowd out the smaller ones, agglomerating to themselves ever greater shares of the marketplace.

     Monopoly capitalism consolidates its gains

     The stock market has rebounded after the shortest “bear market” in history — “a marked display of what analysts describe, by turns, as optimism, hubris or sheer speculative greed,” says The New York Times. Maintaining these stock surges, however, “is heavily reliant on federal spending, easy monetary policy and continued signs of progress in the hunt for virus vaccines.” The reader may note that such things as lower unemployment, more social spending, higher wages, and lower coronavirus case numbers and deaths in the short-term – not to mention even actual corporate revenue and profits – are not among the concerns of the stock market.

     While stock indexes may be at record highs, the gains are far from universal, even among major companies. “Almost all the gains in major stock market indexes this year are attributable to the surging share prices of a few giant technology companies, foremost among them Apple, Amazon and Microsoft,” reports The New York Times.

     “A weak economy can actually be quite good for Wall Street,” explains the Times, “if it means that the Fed keeps the river of freshly created money — what’s known on Wall Street as liquidity — flowing into financial markets.” The Times notes that this is why studies show “little connection” between economic growth and the stock market.

     On August 27, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would be keeping interest rates at near zero for the long-term, even if it causes inflation to rise, all but stating outright the government’s intention to try to drive the stock market up as high as it possibly can.

     Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Global Research, quoted in The New York Times, calls this the “nihilistic” bull market of 2020. “The performance of the market in the face of such dire expectations for growth, he wrote, is just the latest example of investors betting that low growth will prompt the Fed to continue pushing money into the financial system, ultimately bolstering stocks. In other words, stocks are going up not because of economic optimism, but because the future looks fairly grim.”

     It’s much worse than 2009

     Many economists, including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, predict that this downturn will last a very long time — and for good reason. It took the U.S. economy nearly 10 years to add the number of jobs that have been wiped out so far this year. The share of the population that has a job is at its lowest level since the 1960s — and far lower than at any point during the Great Recession.

     Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that the U.S. economy will contract by 4.6% this year — nearly double the 2.5% contraction in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession.

     With states’ tax revenue plummeting while workers were laid-off or furloughed en masse, state governments are now seeking to re-balance their budgets not by raising taxes on the rich — heaven forbid! — who have received 95% of income gains since the Great Recession of ten years ago, but by massive austerity suffered by workers and the poor, disproportionately women and people of color.

     Already, 2.8 million state and local government workers have lost their jobs since February — over four times more than the 750,000 jobs cut during five years in the Bush-Obama recession. There are estimates that the jobs of 2.8 million more state and local government workers could be cut.

     These massive cuts to jobs for state and local government workers come on top of already enormous cuts in public employment. Before the pandemic, twenty-one states and Washington D.C. still had fewer government jobs than in July 2008. Those jobs are especially likely to be held by women and people of color — and are much more likely than average to be unionized. Public sector unionization is currently at 37 percent, compared with 7 percent in the private sector.

     California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a 10 percent pay cut on all state employees and suspended planned pay raises. Newsom, who is a multi-millionaire, pledged that his own pay would also be cut 10 percent, but the Sacramento Bee found two months later that he had not taken any cut at all and kept receiving his full $17,000 per month salary.

     Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is planning similar massive austerity. Cuomo and state Democrats are cutting billions from Medicaid during a pandemic, alongside massive cuts to public education. Cuomo, who briefly became a media darling for his daily COVID-19 press conferences that took the pandemic much more seriously than Trump, refuses to raise taxes on rich New Yorkers. New York City is home to 92 billionaires.

     What more is there to say about a diseased system in which the worst of times for the vast majority becomes the best of times for the corporate elite? Capitalism – administered in turn by its twin parties of war and plunder – cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, at the hands of the vast majority who suffer its inherent evils. Today, the first legions of those forces are in the streets in unprecedented numbers, condemning capitalism’s systemic racism. They portend earthshaking struggles in the period ahead.

     https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/03/in-the-worst-of-times-the-billionaire-elite-plunder-working-class-america/

     • Joint stock companies have been very useful instituutions inasmuch as they allow the aggregation of large amounts of capital from many sources. However there seem to be problems in the way they are structured.
       Stock market values probably bear no relation to actual book values of the company!es concerned. Another problem is that published accounts are drawn up in a way that reflects only the shareholders’ point of view rather than that of whole company, including various classes of employees.

   • Has it occurred to you Snow White , that the rich are “perfectly pleasant people” because they are,either directly or indirectly, responsible for “the hurting poor, and the hurting planet,and the crippled future”. Oh yes ,they are perfectly happy with the system.

     • Hang on , hang on , garibaldi and Afewknowthetruth, I think the ”The rich are of no concern to me, many are perfectly pleasant people” thing has been taken a bit out of context,…

       First off , many of them ARE NICE. Many are philanthropic donating millions upon millions to foreign country’s that are incredibly poor with high mortality rates, others to childhood cancer wards and research, and so on. And many are humble regards their wealth , many having inherited it. Many are those quiet types behind the scenes who make things happen with and enable vital social programs in such things as churches , civic programs etc … yet you often never hear of them. And they are gracious and emphatic types.

       And not all of them believe in exploitative, extractive, rip shit and bust neo liberal capitalism and plunder either. I don’t have a problem with trade and capitalism per se’, … but I DO have a problem with neo liberalism. I believe trade and industry must be regulated and balanced, – by govts. Not the market.

       There are bad poor people and there are bad rich people, and visa versa.

       In NZ’s case, we had a particularly ruthless, anti democratic small group of people in parliament in which two were board members of the Mont Pelerin society. Both of them Finance Ministers in first Labour and National. Those were the ones who were rich and advocated solely for the rich both here and abroad. They infested both the Labour party and the National party and forever changed our social strata, the impact on our environment , our labour laws and created a genuine society of haves and have not’s that has led to whole families having to live in cars, unable to buy a home let alone rent one, inability to pay for warming of a home or adequately feed a family.

       Absolutely unheard of in the 1960’s and 70’s.

       It is the treasons of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson we need to be mindful of, – and posthumously award the same treasons against Thatcher and Reagan.

       Keynesian economics kept such as these in relative check and balance, – neo liberalism let them loose wholesale upon the globe with their ensuing destructive parasitic agendas. With the result others jumped on the bandwagon after being emboldened and joined in with the plundering.

       As I said, I’ve met a fair few downright nasty bastards in the working class, a fair few wannabe middle classer’s and a few shitheaded Nouveau riche and I daresay there will be some pretty evil 1%er’s around the globe. Quite a few of them, I suspect. But not all people who just happen to be rich are bastards.

       • WK
         “It is the treasons of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson we need to be mindful of”
         Both of these plants were here to do a job to shift the goalposts so the poor do without and the rich gain.
         Mont Perelin Society of which they were both members. The war of the rich taking spoils from the poor.

         https://thedailyknell.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-mont-pelerin-society-the-ultimate-neoliberal-trojan-horse/

         https://reneweconomy.com.au/mont-pelerin-society-revealed-home-leaders-climate-science-denial-63003/

       • WK
         “Many are philanthropic donating millions upon millions to foreign country’s that are incredibly poor with high mortality rates, others to childhood cancer wards and research, and so on”
         Wealth comes from labour.

         Those who have stuffed their pockets with wealth created by others no doubt don’t miss a few crumbs off their table now and then as it doesn’t make a dent in what they have accumulated and will keep accumulating.
         But they don’t create the wealth they just collect it. Parasites

       • “It is the treasons of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson we need to be mindful of,”
         Both members of the Mont Perelin Society.

         https://thedailyknell.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-mont-pelerin-society-the-ultimate-neoliberal-trojan-horse/

         • Yeah , I’m a long time commentator on all you’ve said, and typically I like to use this excellent website as an introductory for those who either don’t know or have forgotten:

           New Right Fight – New Zealand. Against the political New Right.
           http://newrightfight.co.nz/

           But that doesn’t mean to say all rich people are pricks , either.

           • Well worth reading.WK.

             And going back further John A Lee diaries tell a lot.

         • I am behind John Win-Stanley on this as the circulation of wealth has been diverted to a small rich set away from the masses who pay the mass of taxes, and industry has been moved to offshore cheap extortion labour markets.

   • “The rich must live more simple, so that the poor may simply live.”
     Mahatma Gandhi.

     • ms
       MG is a very wise leader who lived the life he spoke of. A far sighted thinker who looked at the consequences of what we are doing and where that would lead.
       Read, mull over and think about the wisdom offered.
       https://www.tinytechindia.com/mahatmagandhi

       • Yes, John W. He certainly was a very, very special human being.

         In the light of the unfolding social, economic and ecological meltdown, I have the strong feeling that we have to rediscover and practically apply his concept of civil disobedience, as the western parliamentary system demonstrates being unable to offer competent alternatives.

         By the way, some interesting rural technology on that linked website…

   • The concentration of wealth is THE concern when you might think of the hurting poor and the hurting planet.

     However nice they may seem is a separate issue.

     Wealth comes from labour. Those that do the labour are not the rich. Parasites.

     • John W – It seems to me that there are those who become rich as the fruits of their own labour, and deserve to.

       The highly trained – more years of training than most want to know about, or could comprehend – surgeon warrants a higher rate of pay than a fruit picker. So does a glorious singer like Kiri Te Kanawa, who brings pleasure and adds so much to the quality of other people’s lives; the writer of Harry Potter books introducing children to the life-expanding joys of reading and perhaps providing a pathway to the realms of higher thought; the plumber doing an often dirty smelly job at all hours; the bespoke tailor taking pride in his craft and risking his eyesight; the farmers rising before the dawn chorus to chore all day on the land; the painter of a masterpiece which raises us all above the humdrum of the everyday. Sometimes they become rich, and why not ?

       I suggest that categorising all the rich as undeserving is as idiotic as categorising all the poor as deserving.

       • Far be it to categorise wealth as being undeserving providing the wealth is it is earned with labour. No one can earn a billion dollars.

         Earning is very different to collecting other peoples wealth through fiscal schemes such as banking or selling derivatives like jonkey did knowing that they would be worth nothing during a downturn which is what happened in 2008. Many pension schemes were robbed in that manner.
         Profit does need some controls or gross inequity develops.
         Skill and contribution to society is worthy of recognition but the gravy train of CEOs getting hundreds of times what an employee earns is organised corruption.

         In many cooperatives in Spain and Italy a CEO’s wage is capped at a maximum of say 5 times that of a shop floor worker and cooperative member.

         Doctors in Cuba are paid a much lower salary than in NZ. Cuba has a free education system but requires doctors to work in Cuba for a minimum period after their training. Hence Cuba does not have a shortage of doctors nor medical staff. NZ needs to take a different approach to the present one where we need to import doctors and nurses or our health system couldn’t run. Our model is wrong.

8. Well Amnesty Int’l & GreenPeace having been waiting in the wings on Waiheke for this for a while! I think there will be a fight for where there HQ will be set up.

9. But Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons are dead…? To late son.
   How about an apology to Metiria Turei instead? She was the person wee jimmy and his righteous few white Right corporate swamp-walker privateers fucked over.
   I think wee jimmy should just quietly go away and let Chloe Swarbrick take the helm.
   I can imagine Chloe Swarbrick and Metirea Turei engaging with our younger farmers with offers of better than 4 to 6% at farm gate returns, the end of foreign banking exploitation and a commission of inquiry into past and present politicians and our very own Kiwi-As 1%’er urban riche.
   Ahhh … What a lovely thought.
   Right now? There are massive sheds stuffed with wool ‘bought’ from farmers ( Because they have no choice but to sell. ) for less than $1.00 a kg.
   I just bought a new jersey, is quite nice. It’s 45 % Marino, 45% possum and 10% nylon* , just to keep the crooks in the petrochemical industry happy, and I can assure you, for no other reason.
   Because it’s 45% possum it’s incredibly light, it would weight a scant few grams, and equally incredibly warm.
   It was a factory second, I’m not sure why, and it cost $179.00.
   With the possum, all you have to do is lay hands on the poor little bugger then rip out their fluff and to avoid a fuss it’s best to kill them first.
   With a sheep, think large smelly baby that shits where it eats and requires round the clock feeding and pampering until you can shear it and break even on it’s fluffs while a woollen jersey sells for upwards of $200 for a few grams while the farmer gets less for the wool than it costs to have it shorn from the animal.
   (An average cross breed sheep will yield about 3kg of raw wool. The sheep costs about $3 to shear.)
   It’s been like that for farmers for years and years and years.
   Great work National ! As a farmer, I can really see why you’re the farmers bestie. Without farmers to exploit you’d not be so fat and round and rich and chipper and shinny and that’s a nice car you’re driving.
   You farmers with National Party Hoardings in your paddocks? Sure does speak volumes about your political acumen.
   *A pure wool garment can be popped into the compost heap once it’s more holes than fibre.
   Is like saying goodbye to a dear old dog.
   A word of advice to young people.
   You have a leader. All is not lost.
   I take back everything negative I’ve written about Chloe Swarbrick here and I apologise to her unreservedly.
   This kid’s the dawn of tomorrow’s AO/NZ politics.
   Farmers? You might think Chloe Swarbrick is this and that but I’m telling you, she’s going to be your saviour. You will get higher at the gate returns and the scum who currently have their shiny shoes in the trough will be neutralised.
   Chloe Swarbrick.
   RNZ
   OK Chlöe – What politics is really like for Aotearoa’s youngest MP
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/loading-docs-2020/story/2018758472/loading-docs-2020-ok-chloe-what-politics-is-really-like-for-aotearoa-s-youngest-mp

   • ”How about an apology to Metiria Turei instead? She was the person wee jimmy and his righteous few white Right corporate swamp-walker privateers fucked over. I think wee jimmy should just quietly go away and let Chloe Swarbrick take the helm”…

     —————————————————

     Absolutely. I was thinking of making a mention of ‘Met’ as well. But I got busy house hunting. Glad you did instead. If there’s one quality Metirea came through loud and clear it was that she is a woman of tremendous heart. And she did what she did to make sure her child didn’t go without,- which I will say , – like so many other women, they were forced into by the pernicious, spiteful fractious and odious ideology of neo liberalism.

     If the odious far right wing media backed by their equally as slimy and pathetic neo liberal political stooges hadn’t had their way in hiding behind the LETTER of the law instead coming out in the SPIRIT of the law, – this country would have been well on the way to seeing poor people having justice, – and then the REAL QUESTIONS of who’ve been ripping off the NZ commons for the last 36 years would have been asked.

     LET THOSE WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE !

     Gareth Hughes speech on hypocrisy.
     https://youtu.be/0cpgO9pg-48?t=4

   • Cb
     Meanwhile the synthetic fabrics largely replacing wool, shed microfibers that are polluting the planet, all waterways and can be found in nearly all living creatures.
     Wool is a much healthier option for clothing than synthetics and recognition of that may boost sales.
     Get out your knitting needles both at home and in school/s

10. haha those greens could be accused of colourful appropriation

11. Chris please write a song titled ‘Ground control to minor party’

12. Another yawn. Worst things happening than this, in NZ.

13. Is this Trotter on Bourbon?

14. Shaw has not had the grounding in green activism which is essential to gain a perspective of what change is about.
    Russell Norman lived the convictions he held and still does.

    “You must be the change you want to see” – Gandhi

    • John W – Is this the same Gandhi who routinely slept with naked nublile women to test his own chasity? Who advised married men to abstain from sex with their wives and have cold showers instead ? Who had a magical belief in the power of semen ? Spare me.

15. Aw
    You may be cherry picking without providing a fuller picture.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/01/gandhi-celibacy-test-naked-women

    Gandhi was a highly moral man who led a nation to reject the British domination and taxation collected by a private British company who made todays equivalent of 45 Trillion dollars from robbing India’s people and caused famine and starvation.
    He was highly intelligent and deeply admired by Einstein..

    https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/gandhi-and-einstein-two-great-minds-with-shared-values

    http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/albert_einstein_expresses_his_admiration_for_mahatma_gandhi.html

    • And yet when I’ve spoken to many Indians they hate the Gandhi dynasty. Which came as a shock to me. Favoritism and some kind of despotism apparently.

      • WK
        I think the Gandhi family politicians who came after Mahatma were a very different kettle of fish. Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She was a socialist so had a strong opposition but was also charged with corruption.

        Corruption is rife in the Indian political scene and that is the route taken by the East India Company, but they used British soldiers to enforce their wished when corruption met with opposition

        • Yeah , watched the film, bought the tee shirt, but it was the same as many said of ‘Dances with wolves”,… until you learnt that the Sioux displaced the Ojibwe and Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara ( whom Custer had many scouts)… they were not angels but aggressors.

          The point being, the Ghandi’s were not liked, and for good reason. They were dynastic, they used inhouse means to further political and economic aims , and if they learnt anything from the British , it was subterfuge. Perhaps the core vestiges of Gandhi’s teachings were commendable, but the grasping future family progeny doesn’t seem to bear up to this fact.

          • Agreed. The progeny traded on the great respect for Mahatma’s and in so doing got away with corruption and stealing wealth.

16. So which political party in the current miserable clutch has the ability and capacity to set up systems and structures that
    make it possible for the bottom two thirds of the population to live without the current levels of fear and anxiety. Without the creeping conformity we’re plagued with? Without all the ‘stop that independence nonsense!’ rules and commands that stop us finding solutions.

    People say they’ll be in dire straits when the winter fuel payment. Ms Sepuloni says ‘Go to WINZ’. No idea, that woman. No idea at all. Give up freedom for barely enough to scrape by on while landlords get the true benefit of the accommodation allowance. And the government can fix that situation but doesn’t. Who do they truly represent and care for? Not the bottom two thirds, for sure.

    So many debt slaves kow towing and complying with infringing demands.

    And the Greens are part of the problem. They’re useless as advocates for the bottom two thirds and floundering fools on environmental matters.

    In parting – perhaps Sue Bradford had the wit to see what was ahead. A decent socialist – unlike the person who got the job. She simply would not have fitted in or been able to work the good she wanted to.

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