The deregulation architects, benefactors and Free Market Death Cult Capitalists are for the first time in their lives, terrified of losing their privileged wealth and political influence.
The 35 year neoliberal experiment in New Zealand’s politics, culture and economy has been dealt a knock out blow by the pandemic which has highlighted the enormous inequalities essential to neoliberalism’s dominance.
What has turned its cultural values and myths on their head is the solidarity this unique moment in history has delivered us.
In an individual uber allas culture where we are increasingly divided into intersectionist sub categories of sub categories, our differences have been weaponised while the common ground forgotten.
This shared sacrifice that the lockdown has forced upon us has rekindled solidarity just when the Right had thought they had finally stamped it out.
The recognition of how fragile and interconnected we really are, how dependent upon the good will of others and how kindness really is the only way forward have combined to ignite the concept, the feeling and the power of solidarity.
And it is terrifying the bejesus out of those who have benefitted most from its erasure.
The unforgivable tax cuts announced by National to the middle classes while the working classes pay the highest essential worker cost is nightmare enough, but the mercenary nature of the bribe funded from the Covid response budget is an act of outright ideological desperation.
The Right are desperately attempting to extinguish this blaze of solidarity by appealing to our most selfish natures and it is philosophically reprehensible.
For the Right, this loss won’t just represent a second term of Labour, it will represent the beginning of a fault line shift in the NZ political landscape away from neoliberalism, towards a far larger state with a far larger mandate.
In a crisis the people cry out to the State for protection, especially when they feel they have universally sacrificed, this births a solidarity that becomes uncontainable to the lesser angels of our nature.
Divide and conquer only works if the people are divided.
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Hence also National’s recent attempts to create a schism between rural and urban folk.
I am hoping the majority of farmers are intelligent enough to see beyond Judeath’s childish manipulations.
Not all farmers have been divided and conquered in this regard.
There are many examples of folk from our agricultural, pastoral, horticultural and viticultural industries who want to lessen their environmental footprint and follow best practice.
And they don’t feel obliged to vote for a lying blue pyschopath from the party that screwed up with M Bovis, Kiwifruit Psa, etc etc.
All is on track for an ‘October surprise’, with the bull run of the American markets now over and the so-called correction underway.
‘S&P Enters Correction, Down 10% From Highs, Goes Red YTD’
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/sp-enters-correction-down-10-highs-goes-red-ytd
Chris Martenson, who recently wrote ‘Brace for impact’ points out that
‘Collapse Is A Process, Not An Event’
https://www.peakprosperity.com/collapse-is-a-process-not-an-event/
In that excellent article he points out what many of us have known for a while: ‘massive and disruptive change has arrived’.
Chris goes on to point out that:
‘The hardest part about detecting collapse lies not with the data – that is clear as a bell ringing on a still morning – but with the emotional difficulty of accepting it (and then acting on it).
There’s a lot of science behind how we humans are wired to accept or reject information based on whether it confirms or refutes, respectively, the belief systems we are already holding.
Nobody desires harder times for themselves. Nobody wants to lose financial ground or leave behind a worse world for their children.
But what we want has nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
What we want is usually based on our preexisting belief systems. If those are out of alignment with the actual reality of the situation, then our best chances for personal success lie with adjusting our beliefs as rapidly as we can.
While our brains can come up with some clever delaying tactics and can-kicking technologies, the reality is that we’re just another organism on a crowded planet, subject to the same rules as every other life form.
When we have ample resources available to us, we’re peaceful, creative creatures. We do really cool things, like figure out germ theory and make computer chips.
But what happens when resources are tight, or even insufficient to support daily life?
Then humans act badly towards each other and become tribal, but not in a good way. We squabble and go to war over dwindling resources. We do this not because it’s a dominant strategy with a proven track record, we do it because of our inability to wisely recognize the resource limitations in advance and cleverly avoid them.
During such times, the elites have a noted tendency to cling ever more tightly to their relative advantage rather than yield any of towards the common good:
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
That’s what’s underway right now. Economic oxygen is in short supply and the elites are busy hoovering up for themselves a gigantically-larger share of that dwindling air (see billionaire headline above) even as tens of millions of their fellow citizens find themselves increasingly financially strangled.
On the political side, the only true political commitment I can detect (and it’s equal in both US political parties) is to defend the status quo. In other words, they are committed to keeping the causes of our problems fixed firmly in place.’
Can we be at all surprised that the National Party -public front for the looters-and-polluters and transfer-wealth-upwards ecological maniacs and sociopaths- would want to raid the till as the business goes under? It is more-or-less a given that the rapacious, mendacious thieves that constitute National will try every trick they can think of to not just hang on to their unearned wealth and to deceive the masses yet again but to try to acquire a bigger slice of the rapidly diminishing ‘pie’.
The saddest aspect of all this is that no one in parliament is prepared to call a spade a spade and call national what they really are: liars and thieves.
Meanwhile, in the real world, everything that matters continues to be made worse by politicians everywhere.
Even as the ‘Titanic’ sinks, politicians of all colour affiliations insist on futile efforts to ‘restart the flooded engines’ rather than launching lifeboats. One reason is probably that they know there are not enough lifeboats.
The other important aspect of Death Cult capitalism to consider is Disaster Capitalism, whereby rather than distribute water to people who are dying of thirst, ‘entrepreneurs’ will try to sell water to the victims of their mendacious scheming.
As Charles Hugh Smith has once again pointed out, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an ever faster pace. And the ramifications of that are to be seen. But armed insurrection is definitely on the cards in the US, if not in NZ.
‘These are the core drivers of the exodus from work.
1. labor’s share of the economy has been in multi-decade decline. It’s easy to blame globalization and/or automation–and it’s true that the decline in labor’s share accelerated from 2000 on. But this trend began around 1970, long before China joined the World Trade Organization and the advent of “software eating the world.” (see chart below)
2. While it’s convenient for those reaping the big gains (see chart below) to blame globalization and/or automation, the real driver was financialization–the neoliberal move to deregulate finance so it could turn everything into an exploitable “market” that could be made to serve one master: shareholder value, the innocuous-sounding code-phrase for anything goes and winner takes most–if you’re rich.
Shareholder value was the super-wealthy’s self-serving justification for unlimited greed as corporations went from being enterprises serving communities, the national interest, employees, customers and shareholders to financialization machines whose sole purpose was enriching insiders via loading the company with debt to pay huge bonuses to top managers, stock buybacks funded by debt, the abandonment of trustworthy accounting principles and so on.
Financialization and the deification of shareholder value sluiced all the gains into the hands of the few at the top at the expense of the many. As the chart below indicates, the top 0.1% enjoyed income gains of around 350% since 1979 while the bottom 90% barely topped 20%–a number that would be sharply negative if real-world inflation were included.
Simply put, the bottom 90%–wage-earners–lost ground over the past four decades of financialization while the wealthy winners of financialization became super-wealthy. The rewards of labor/work have diminished to an extraordinary degree for the bottom 90%, and even the 91% – 99% bracket has found their labor has mostly served to enrich those above them.’
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-silent-exodus-nobody-sees-leaving.html
The saddest aspect of all this is that no one in parliament is prepared to call a spade a spade and call national what they really are: liars and thieves.
Agree.
Yep, the emperor’s got no clothes. Neoliberals of course can’t see that; but the worst thing is those who do suspect the farce, for the most part, suffer from inertia.
And today’s inertia can too easily become tomorrow’s dementia.
Then what did happen to the poor man’s reform that some economists call “microeconomic reform?” In other words, the government has never ever compensated beneficiaries for putting GST on them all. That is literally the government taking money out of the pockets of small business and pocketing it.
Spot on, Sam!!!
Afkttruth, Thank you.
Hard to contest your analysis.
What to do eh? Watch this space and be amazed ..
National’s tax cuts are a unforgivable insult to the 70% plus of the lower income folk in this country.
$8 dollars for anyone earning under $65k a year represents about a half kg of cheese a week, when John Key gave us twice that amount which was $15 dollars a week when he drooped tax cuts 8 yrs ago and considering $15 is actually around $22 in today’s value.
So this breadcrumb fiscal amount given to the poor and needy was a deliberate insult to us 70% voter/taxpayer.
So don’t vote for National or anyone who insults you when you are seriously needing help to survive folks; – don’t vote National.
Vote for Labour, like your life depended on it, because it just might, because if elected, the National Neoliberal Party will gamble with your life & that of your Family to preserve their deathcult trickledown economics of Neoliberalism which has failed utterly under the blowtorch if this Covid Pandemic!
Many lives depend on it. Thank you for writing that.
Death Cult capitalism: Dying for Dollars: Capitalism is a death cult http://socialist.ca/node/4162
Actually The Free Market was defined by early economists not as do what thou will but the elimination of the feudal left over of rentier privilege. Landlordism for capital gain would have been abhorrent.
Tax is levied from the people to help the people not to futher enrich the privatised sector and polarising wealth by giving it back.
But Labour are hardly better in fact worse by refusing to levy a serious CGT say 70% and redirecting that money to help less fortunate kiwis. Their sin is of ommission is in fact is worse than National’s of commission. All for the reason of winning an election rather than standing on principle which in fact they no longer have or believe in.
In other words this is a crisis of capitalism, a system which has exhausted its ability to produce what people need without killing us and the natural world that sustains us.
We have seen the capitalist ruling class panicked by the fear of revolution before several times in the crisis ridden 20th century.
Capitalist crisis is defined as the breakdown of the production of value – the whole basis for profits which is the life blood of the parasitic ruling class.
It has happened before and regularly, as the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall kicks in.
No other economic theory has explained this apart from Marxism.
Every depression to revive profits at the expense of the working people has led to war which destroyed vast wealth until a new period of growth resulted.
The first was the rise of imperialism and the war to divide the world among them. The Russian revolution forced the big powers to end the war and invade the USSR to stop the ‘Red Menace’.
The revolution is Europe was stopped dead by fascism and genocide.
The second was the spread of the ‘Red Menace’ as the USSR occupied Eastern Europe and the colonial world rose up for liberation which ended with the Chinese Revolution.
The antidote was the Cold War and many smaller wars and invasions until the collapse of the USSR and China back into capitalism.
But each depression followed by war produced a weaker recovery as capitalism’s capacity to produce value declined.
We have been in a long depression since the 1970s, which the neoliberal ‘recovery’ of the 80s and 90s could not overcome.
The period since the GFC in 2008 has led to a weak return of profits way below the post-war boom.
The pandemic has been the catalyst for the onset of the biggest crisis of declining capitalism which cannot avoid the destruction of the human habitat.
Can capitalism recover from this terminal crisis?
Climate catastrophe says NO.
So this time the ruling class will stop at nothing to survive, even if it means the rest of us don’t.
Which means that we need to look back at all the attempts by working people to fight for their survival in the previous crisis.
It is obvious that fascism is again becoming the last resort for capital to smash any threat to its rule. But it cannot escape its ultimate fate.
The only question is will it be by the hands of the masses rising up or ecological collapse?
Trump says he may not leave office if he loses. That is not a crazy man talking but a fascist boss rallying his troops for the class war that is looming.
The ‘conversation’ we need is not about which political party can deliver what we need through parliament.
It is about how the working people who are the vast majority of humanity can organise to replace the rotten international capitalist system that is driving us all to doom.
Yes, Dave. Everything you’re saying is underscored here:
Greenwashing Capitalism Wont Heal the Planet
“As the world moves deeper into the climate crisis, too many of the official solutions to slow global warming and transition to a decarbonized society stop short of stating the obvious: our economic system is broken and must be replaced. Capitalism is incompatible with life on Earth.”
The level of denial that we are all guilty of, to greater or lesser degrees, along with the fallacy of TINA (There Is No Alternative) that many are wedded to and many more are resigned to, have brought our species to the brink of extinction. We have been so conditioned into believing we can do no better than capitalism that the idea of ditching this rotten system can feel inconceivable — even though plenty of us hate it, even though it hurts us and our society, even though it is burning up the planet.
Instead, there is a strongly held view that we can make fixes to the current system and somehow, we will be OK.
————————
“Always, the environment is subservient to the economy, something to be protected for the sake of the economy and its needs. Therefore, climate change is an economic risk or threat that must be managed like any other economic risk or threat.”
Nowhere do the analyses conceive of an economy not driven by profit or based on continuous growth and GDP. The best they might do is argue that economic growth can be balanced with environmental protection through “green growth” or “clean growth.” Full article at link above.
The answer is here: Poverty Action Plan
It is not perfect. It needs adjustments here and there. Some figures need improving. However, it IS AN ACTUAL PLAN. No other party has offered anything close to it. Aotearoa NZ needs something like this as a launch pad, as a starting point, if we are to lift ourselves out of the shameful wealth divide towards becoming a more egalitarian nation. NZs Astounding Wealth Gap, The Guardian August 2020
We’ve got people like Mathew Whitehead and that gutless thing Weka going around trying to inspect everyone’s payslip so they can shame everyone. Now we just need to put those types of shitheads in there place outside of the Green Party and that’s that.
I’m remembering a quote from inspirational Helen Kelly:
“Instead of ‘Winner takes all’ it has to be ‘It takes all of us to win’ “.
And, together we did win.
As I see it the DC Capitalist tag is a Red herring. Take away the Covid election and the (we’ll keep you safe tactic) take away the intentions , nice social promises that have not been actioned and add the massive debt which will haunt us for 50 years and what have you got. Nothing. At least the DCC try to generate something. This Government generates nothing in my opinion. Except debt that is , and the poor won’t gain out of that. I wouldn’t think. If you are going to fix all the problems you need money. Lots of it.
GOOD NEWS: NATIONAL HAS INVENTED GLASSES FOR RICH PEOPLE THAT MAKE POOR PEOPLE INVISIBLE .
Nationals ” tax cuts ” / “election bribe ” are to be taken from a 14 Billion Nation Wide Health Fund designed to protect all people from Covert. But instead of retaining the fund for any ongoing health crisis , and as businesses fold and unemployment grows ,they intend give most of that money to the wealthiest half of NZ . Prudent governance indeed .
Most wealthier people will save ,not spend ,the money ,which does nothing for economic recovery.If you really want the economy to take off you give it to the bottom half because they have no option but to spend it .
National consistently only looks after the top half of the country .The poor half of the country are invisible to National because they just don’t care .
They are the polemic reversal of Robin Hood , as they rob from the poor to give to the rich .
Elitist self serving , planet wrecking arseholes.
The only enlightened form of growth required for right wing protagonists , is intellectual and spiritual growth , coupled with a growth in collective empathy for all living entities. That’s real growth .
Greater consumptive growth , urban growth and population growth is simply flooring the accelerator on the death cult capitalist “destruction express “as it speeds towards the cliff of planetary ecoside .
I want to get off the bus .
The entire political philosophy is redundant .
Its a dooms day cult .
The world is burning .
Have a squiz at the new David Attenbourgh ECO MOVIE.
He got 2.5 million instagram followers in one day .
slightly more ,than Judith got , for eating a whitebait pattie in Hokitika.
Ms Collin’s , wake up , its not 1963 .
Its a dooms day cult . The world is burning .
Yes. Those in the US who are half awake are going through similar feelings and thoughts, as they too are facing election ‘debates’. The call that has been put out there should apply to us in Aotearoa too. It is that the election debate moderators ensure that climate change is the main focus of those debates.
Here is a link to this article: Planet at Stake, Moderators Must Make Climate a Focus of Debates
“The climate crisis has been and continues to be a top issue for voters and one that can’t be ignored by journalists for another four years.”
Wildfires continue to devastate the West Coast, and both the Arctic and Antarctica are exhibiting dramatic ice loss (CNN, 9/15/20). Given how little time experts say we have to prevent irreversible damage from climate change, this year’s election is truly a crucial one for the future of the planet. And climate disruption remains a top priority for many voters. That means the climate crisis must be a central focus of the presidential debates—the main opportunity for most voters to hear the candidates questioned about their positions on major policy issues. Full article at link.
GOOD NEWS: NATIONAL HAS INVENTED GLASSES FOR RICH PEOPLE THAT MAKE POOR PEOPLE INVISIBLE .
Yes, and those glasses are embedded in mainstream media. Sometimes they call it “the news”.
They also makes Climate Change invisible, even in the midst of massive forest fires, droughts, floods, super-storms etc. They are extraordinarily powerful glasses.
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