I have been arguing since Bernie Sanders stood against Hilary that the only way to combat Trump’s (and the wider rights) negative populism is popular populism.
Why is Zohran so popular?
Look at what he is promoting:
- Rent Freeze
- Government backed supermarkets to lower the cost of food
- Free public transport
- Free childcare
This is socialism that recognises the role of the State is to subsidise the basic cost of living, not throw people to the wolves of rampant free market capitalism!
Zohran understands that people yearn for material upgrades, not endless identity politics!
Not one poor family is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills, and when the working poor turn to us on the Left for solutions and see only alienating identity politics dogma being served up as a solution, they turn away in anger at us.
I’ve only been pointing this other since 2016.
Meanwhile the planet burns.
If we’ve all finished alienating possible voters with pure temple politics, how’s about some good old fashioned Broadchurch class solidarity instead?
- Free public transport
- An Iwi back 3rd Supermarket chain.
- First $20 000 tax free
- GST off essentials
- Free Dental
- Free Health
- Free Education
Left Universalism is our goal, subsidising the biggest costs for the poorest people.
The NZ Left needs to move beyond the low hanging fruit of identity politics and the illusion of awareness…
Bregman says one antidote to that fear is “moral ambition.” It’s his term for people who blend the idealism of an activist with the ruthless pragmatism of an entrepreneur to make the world a better place. In his new book, “Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,”Bregman uses the example of that German shipyard worker and other ordinary people to critique what he sees as a common failing of people on the left: They fall for the “illusion of awareness,” a belief that simply exposing people to injustice will inspire them to act.
“Awareness doesn’t put food on the table. Awareness won’t keep a roof over your head,” writes Bregman, a vegan who has spoken out against animal factory farming. “With awareness, you don’t cool down the planet, you’re not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won’t make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.”
…the manner in which social media school chambers have radicalised voters into Qanon militia speaks to a deeper wound and is reminiscent of the way global Muslim youth were radicalised in the 1990s and 2000s thanks to online Jihadist recruitment videos.
Citizens should feel angry and cynical at a system that is rigged in favour of the rich!
The Left should lean into that populism!
We need to focus on how to combat this terrible racist, anti-worker, anti-Treaty, anti-renter, anti-beneficiary, anti-environment Government who are selling out the common good for the interests of their donor friends.
We have to re-establish the egalitarian mission by promoting policy that directly challenges the capitalist status quo in meaningful ways.
Without vision, the Left is lost and that is why Chippy’s targeted capital gains is such smart politics.
The vast majority of Kiwis won’t have to pay this, yet it provides 3 free GP visits per year and pumps more money into public health!
I’m not look to Chippy for the Marxist Utopia.
That ain’t him.
He is a decent bloke with true values who sure as Christ wouldn’t have given hundreds of millions to the Big Tobacco, Social Media Giants or Oil and Gas pimps.
The job of Labour is to win back the voters who voted Labour in 2020 and then voted National in 2023.
The soft middle is who the Future Fund appeals to and who this targeted Capital Gains won’t spook and will ultimately appeal to.
The 3 free GP visits per year is also an enormous win for working people who can’t afford to see Drs.
There is no point in Labour announcing a vast wealth tax to cannibalise vote from the Greens, that don’t get us to 51%!
Labour’s targeted Capital Gains allows the Greens and te Pati Māori to push the Overton Window left and it will be up to them to negotiate a better deal post election.
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Mamdani is bringing everybody together. Even neocon warmonger Bill Kristol is voting for him.
I truly hope Hipkins and team are reading TDB. Clearly he is ramped up this time and while he is showing courage, he also needs to couple this with prudent and wise decision-making and well researched policies, so lacking in this current CoC lineup. While this bullying greedy mob remain, nothing will change – there is no cohesion. NZ is constantly in danger of becoming completely irrelevant, as well as totally destroyed, so a huge change is warranted. Embarrassingly Luxon is running around having photo-shoots, like a teenager at a pop concert. He always has his arm around someone he considers influential, so creepy! His ego is so enormous he vaingloriously took the credit for his trade negotiations in Malaysia with his usual [I] and had to be reminded by Winston it should have been [WE]. Then he had the audacity to tell Hipkins “it isn’t all about me” – since when Luxon? It has, and still is, all about YOU and your narcissistic needs. You see there is no need for you to stick around – you have nothing to give, and to date you have given nothing. Has it ever crossed your mind how other PM’s managed to run the country along with a portfolio? It’s just one big fun ‘road trip’ for you and yours.
Yep
yep he is like a pedophile the way he always has to touch everyone he comes across .I now know trump is blind because he said the skin head was good looking .
It’s his insecurity Gordon he knows how disliked and unpopular he is his own country and so he’s looking for love in all the wrong places.
Go Zohran! The NY Mayoral election will be decided soon, if he wins and if his platform can be delivered on-rent freeze-etc. it will reverberate around much of the world for those who have been running scared under neo lib mantras for far too long.
Some US pundits say Trump is fine with Mamdani as it enables him to unleash a clampdown on NYC.
Free public transport
An Iwi back 3rd Supermarket chain.
First $20 000 tax free
GST off essentials
Free Dental
Free Health
Free Education
I can just hear them now, from the Rightwing politicians, as they stare down the barrel of the TV studio cameras. and I can almost see the mainstream media screaming headlines being prepared, and the editorials being written by mainstream media pundits as they all join in a deafening chorus of…..
“We Can’t Afford it!”
Why the Rich Don’t Pay Taxes
(A video from the US, but just as relevant here)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLKacgW6YOI
362,620 views Premiered Oct 23, 2025
The richest Americans control $46 trillion in wealth—but many pay little or no federal tax.
Ray Madoff @0:00 minutes:
– In 2024, the government raised a total of $5 trillion from all of its sources, from income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, estate and gift taxes, they took in $5 trillion, but the country had expenses of about $6.8 trillion.
So there was a shortfall of $1.8 trillion. Okay?
And, of course, that $1.8 trillion was added to this enormous national debt that we have.
…so the country took in 5 trillion, spent 6.8 trillion, deficit of 1.8 trillion.
At the same time, the amount of wealth owned by the wealthiest Americans was $46 trillion.
An absolutely staggering amount.
When you think about how are we gonna cover that $1.8 trillion shortfall?
My name’s Ray Madoff, and I’m a professor at Boston College Law School,
The wealthy are able to avoid income taxes because their greatest sources of wealth are their investments and their inheritances. And both of those are largely excluded from the income tax system.
The way that investments are excluded is that as property grows in value, right, as Mark Zuckerberg goes from being somebody who has a startup from his dorm room to something that’s worth, you know, over $100 billion, all of that growth in value is not subject to tax unless he actually sells the stock.
And, of course, he has no interest in selling the stock because he wants to maintain control over the assets.
Now, you might wonder, how is it possible for somebody to live well if they don’t sell their assets?
There’s another tool available to them, which is that people with wealth can borrow against those assets.
They can pledge those assets for loans and get tax-free wealth that is never subject to tax.
And this is a very common technique amongst the wealthiest Americans.
A lot of them have a lot of accumulated debt because it enables them to live off of their wealth without having to recognize any taxable income…..
The O’Dea blog gathers speed, the takeover of the TDB almost complete.
The O’Dea blog gathers speed, the takeover of the TDB almost complete.
Good heavens the crazy man at it again repeating himself.
Great opinion by the way Pat, beats dead beat one-line sentences like Bob’s that offer nothing. Clearly your intellectual piece Pat was too much for Bob to comprehend.
Agree. We already have an across-the-board social consensus that things like highways, defence, infrastructure, etc is publicly funded. So should the other necessities of life – once they are recognised as publicly provided essentials, we can still have a thriving free market that works around those immovables. The free market of course should never be so free as to allow some who get ahead far of the pack to then influence and change the rules in their favour.
What about Fonterra farmer suppliers getting a gift 4 billion? I thought that those brands came from the NZ Dairy Board (or whatever they called it) and were put into Fonterra when it was formed? That makes it a big subsidy from the taxpayers to farmers although all the commercial news media say is what a great job the farmers did in creating the value. No mention of Tatua Dairy Co who constantly have a higher payout than Fonterra due to their ability to do value added properly.
” There is no point in Labour announcing a vast wealth tax to cannibalise vote from the Greens, that don’t get us to 51%! ”
And just tinkering rather than boldly tackling our serious problems and acknowledging cause of those problems is continuing the harm that many are enduring socially and economically. It continues to show how inept the current gatekeepers are in endorsing neo liberal economics.
This from against the current.
” THIS BLOG has long warned that under leader Chris Hipkins, Labour will continue on its dire centrist course. Its capital gains tax announcement is yet more evidence that the party has no intention of addressing the structural crisis facing working people and instead will tinker at the margins of a system that has already failed. When a bold and visionary step toward economic and social justice is needed, Labour has delivered a timid, business friendly policy that leaves the economic status quo intact.
The problem is not simply that the tax is too small to make a difference. It is that Labour has once again chosen to frame inequality as a matter of minor imbalances rather than systemic exploitation. By limiting the scope of the tax, the party reinforces the idea that wealth accumulation through property and financial speculation is legitimate, even virtuous, so long as a token slice is skimmed off the top. This is not redistribution—it is window dressing.
https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2025/10/labours-capital-gains-tax-policy.html
What NZ Left need to learn from Zohran Mamdani and how Chippy is doing it
By Martyn Bradbury
Maybe we should compare Mamdani’s policies with Chippy’s policies.
Zoran Mandani’s policies:
Raise New York city’s minimum wage to $30 US (NZD $52.40) by 2030
Free and fast buses
Free universal childcare
Build 200,000 affordable housing units in 10 years
Increase housing density near mass transit hubs
A rent freeze
Expand corporate and high-income taxes to fund tuition-free at City University of New York and State University of New York
City owned and run Grocery stores to lower food prices.
Cut taxes for overtaxed outer-borough homeowners while raising them on expensive homes in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
Mamdani has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
Chippie says it is up to international courts to determine if Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Glaring.
Forget the polls, global betting agency picks Mamdani odds of winning the New York Mayoralty race at 93%
(Cuomo at 7% odds of winning the mayoral election)
Polymarket is the world’s largest prediction market, allowing you to say informed and profit from your knowledge by betting on future events
https://polymarket.com/Elections