Yes, as TDB has been pointing out for sometime, fundamental tectonic eruptions of global free market capitalism are imploding and triggering hyper inflationary pressures that will lead to stagflation..
Energy prices rising despite retailers’ huge profits
Cost of living hits social housing tenants hard with $16 million missed rent owed to Kāinga Ora
Majority of Kiwis planning to cut costs this Christmas as inflation bites
…I love how a lot of the middle class identity politics activists who have spent 2 years alienating every possible voter with woke dogma and Lynch mob cancellations are now all ‘Morganing up’.
‘Morganing Up’: Where a previous social media activist goes from woke drama queen to respectable UK liberal newspaper columnist in an attempt to look more mainstream and less alienating.
The best part of NZ Twitter in election year will be watching all the woke activists who have spent 2 years spitting hate and cancelling everyone now try to woo voters over to them.
I love watching their attempt at political persuasion.
It’s like watching vegans eating steak.
In an election of tribal polarisation and a social media environment of call outs and cancellations, pure temple politics erodes the common ground between voters to build Broadchurch mandates and political majority.
The Greens are suddenly noticing the economy, prominent Wellington Twitteratti Drama Queens are noticing it, even the CTU has paused on middle class virtue signalling to discuss economics.
The activist woke middle class Left seem to have woken up to the fact that their cancel culture is problematic if you’ve cancelled everyone who might vote for you.
The danger of woke middle class identity politics replacing class left analysis is that the politics devolve into a micro aggression deplatforming campaign that alienates rather than builds solidarity against free market capitalism.
The true demarcation of power in a. democratic capitalist state is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers Vs the 90% rest of us.
Identity Politics simply cements into place a caste system of intersectionism alongside a terminal tribal affiliation to your skin colour, gender or identity.
There needs to be far more common ground and shared values.
We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
The minefield of social justice and it’s never ending pure temple deplatforming of everything that triggers it will only drive people further from the Left in an intense economic downturn because you can’t eat virtue signalling aesthetics.
- $608 million in housing equity was made by landlords
- 9.6% increase in rent for tenants
- 18.4% of children live in households earning less than half the median income after housing costs
- $5.5 billion in profit made by ANZ, BNZ, ASB and Westpac
and the Top 1% own 25% of wealth while the Bottom 50% owns 2% of wealth
If you think the worst inflation in 30 years is bad now, wait until the impact of the Ukrainian war and broken supply chains in China hit.
The economic recession is coming, and all the Left has to offer are pronoun cancellations the militantly correct pronunciation of Te Reo and having anyone who doesn’t love cyclists sacked from their jobs.
Poor people aren’t sitting around the table arguing over pronouns or cancelling each other for incorrectly pronouncing Te Reo.
The woke middle class outrage olympics on social media have had a terrible impact on how voters view the wider Left. The woke are endlessly tying themselves in knots over esoteric issues that have little to do with the lived struggles of the majority of Kiwis.
Land Rights for Gay Whales is somehow issues the Left end up championing while the cost of living crushes us.
Rather than this woke nonsense, we urgently need material upgrades for people.
Let’s ensure taxation is targeted at the corporates and the wealthy while subsidising the costs of the poorest.
I present the 10 point Left wing Economic Justice Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand.
1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help.
2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs.
3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.
4: Doubling welfare payments and student allowances minus any bullshit claw backs from MSD plus Living Wage universally adopted as minimum working wage.
5: GST off fresh fruit and vegetables and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health plus a sugar tax.
6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.
7: Debt cancellation – student loans, welfare overpayments, beneficiary debt, easier debt cancellation.
8: Taxation focused on corporations like financial transaction tax, windfall tax and first $10 000 is tax free.
9: Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements) plus universal union membership.
10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances.
Don’t tell me we can’t afford any of this, we just shovelled $60 billion into the pockets of property speculators, we can shovel a tiny fraction of that into the mouths of the poorest.
While the middle class Identity Politics clique continue to find ways to divide us with social justice, economic justice can be a populist working class antidote to the alienation of woke cancel culture.
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Yes but …. My vegan labradoodle identifies as a budgie, and I still expect to ride my bike over the Auckland harbour bridge as promised to me. All this other nonsense of cost of living crisis caused by exploding inflation is just not that important really!
The lack of vegan cuttlefish is trans-parakeet oppression. I see and acknowledge the pain of your Budgie (Whosapretty, Boy, Then).
“We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest”
Whilst it’s a petty point Mart but that comment is not strictly correct. 2% of the 10% rich pricks pay the most tax in NZ. These are the salary workers and/or the ones who choose not to actively avoid tax through trusts and other tax lowering schemes.
So it is the 8% of others with their clawbacks and tax avoidance that need to man up and pay their share.
With all due respect–heh–have any of the above political geniuses ever done anything apart from whinge and make surly, passive aggressive comments online? Have any of you ever been union members, attended protests, rallies and marches, helped achieve political goals at community level?
Martyn’s list is pretty damn good, but as always it will take extra Parliamentary organisation and political grunt to achieve. The current bourgeois Parliamentary parties will not go there until their cosy neo liberal consensus is smashed once and for all. The cosy monetarist deal has existed basically uninterrupted since 1984–apart from static from New Labour/Alliance/Internet Mana–it is the key strategic task for the next 5 years.
Yes. To all your instances in the first paragraph, TM.
What to do – on the ground – today?
The message I’m hearing from a very demoralised what’s-left -of -the- left, in my personal and limited world, sadly, is make popcorn and watch the show.
And I get the despondency and I suspect a lot of the paralysis comes from feeling so bitterly betrayed. But that has to lead to action. Fresh, New. God, I feel depressed just writing those words.
What I’ve decided is that as far as action is concerned, this hiatus is about attending to obstacles in the way, as we simultaneously feel the pain and pay close attention. If a path doesn’t come into focus, (and I believe it will), well, we start bush-crashing.
Well we are making progress! We have gone from making the “rich” a trillion better off apparently, to now 60 billion. That’s a difference of 940 billion. But whose counting.
A new poll should be due out?
and will be bad news for Labour too
But Marty, what public services are you going to cut to pay for them – health, education, Maori affairs, police?
NACT did it before and they’ll cut them again Nikorima.
Hoipoloi, what ignorance those uneducated,what their understanding.
In this fantasy land where is the incentive to work hard and advance you and your family .Reading the list you create a family that is feed and transported by the state they also supply you a house for life if you decide to work you get the living wage no matter what your skill level is . You are looked after by a blotted union that you are forced to join no matter how hopeless they are . Capitalism has faults but the opposite is worse .
What is the opposite…its features and where does it ..prevail?
That would require people like Weka, to acknowledge that society is not built by weak people like women, but by men.
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