NZ companies complicit in culture of violence, intolerance and oppression
War is great for business. About $1.68 trillion worth of business globally as of 2015. Defence market reports say global tension and conflict will drive ongoing defence spending, “leading to global market opportunities for exporters”. Even here in NZ, our comparatively small defence budget is increasing, and NZ based military technology manufacturers are poised to […]
Read More →Theo Spierings: An Icon of Inequality
Mahatma Ghandi said the true measure of any society is its treatment of its most vulnerable members. Others say inequality is the measure of fairness in society. The massive levels of inequality in modern capitalist societies reflect badly by any measure. Egalitarian New Zealand is a myth.
Read More →Little chance of system change, but change in government is a good place to start
For those of us who also want a more fundamental change than just rearranging the parliamentary seating order, and minor changes by degrees, in some ways, hope competes with despair. I’d like to take a vote on neo-liberalism itself but it’s not even on the agenda.
Read More →National Party sacrifices human rights to politics
Bill English and Paula Bennett admitted the new powers would stretch human rights laws, but would only apply to serious criminals who had ‘fewer human rights than others’ anyway, clearly misunderstanding human rights. We should be wary when the Prime Minister and his Deputy are prepared to trade off these rights as a pawn in desperate election politics.
Read More →NZ’s huge criminal underclass created from political choice
Criminals aren’t born, they’re created. They’re created in response to a combination of factors such as socioeconomic status (poverty) and class (social marginalisation and exclusion), family dysfunction, illiteracy, unemployment, substance abuse and mental ill-health. And they’re created by punitive laws, ‘penal populism’ leading to policies ‘strong on law and order’, unconscious bias in the police force, and subsequent distortions in remand terms and conditions, sentencing and incarceration.
Read More →Labour’s prospects after its (latest) leadership change
Labour definitely couldn’t afford to poll any lower – without risking key senior MPs. So the departure of Andrew Little probably couldn’t damage the party any more than if he were to stay. Even though it’s extraordinary (but not unprecedented) for a leader to resign so close to an election, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Read More →G20 meeting highlights the crisis of capitalism
The self-selected ‘cabal’ of ‘Caesars’ meeting at the G20 represented 85% of the world’s GDP, had limited political mandate to make decisions, and excluded most of the ‘Global South’. They embodied the world’s richest elites making decisions affecting the world’s poorest, behind closed doors.
Read More →When Winston Came to Town
Winston Peters came to my home town of Kumeu last weekend. I thought I’d go along to check him out. I’d wondered why people vote NZ First, though a number of good people I know are keen supporters. I wanted to see if the hype was true about his alleged charisma and charm, get to the bottom of those provocative immigration policies, try to get a measure of the man.
Read More →Grenfell Tower – an Epitaph to Epic Failure
Only when inequality, deregulation, austerity and privatisation are reversed, will justice be done for the Grenfell dead.
Read More →British Election Results are a Moral Victory for Corbyn’s Alternative Political Possibilities
The loss of Theresa May’s clear Conservative majority has already rocked conventional assumptions, agendas and elites. The realm of the politically possible has been blasted open – because the electoral support for Corbyn doesn’t just reflect a resurgence for British Labour, it has allowed a publicly popular discussion about a whole different political economy.
Read More →The war on terror fails innocents everywhere
The war on terror has desensitised the western world to senseless waste of life and acts of arbitrary justice in the Middle East, and hypersensitised us to terrorism risks at home.
Read More →Fertiliser causes social injustices in Western Sahara and environmental injustices here
New Zealand farmers are out of step. As a developed agricultural nation selling our produce and our brand to the world, our companies should be among those showing social responsibility in refusing to buy rock phosphate fertiliser from Moroccan occupied Western Sahara.
Read More →Anti-immigration rhetoric blames the victim not the system
Instead of standing of the side of the cultural and capitalist oppressor and adopting its discourse of exclusion and the antagonism of difference, thinking workers of New Zealand, and elsewhere, should show solidarity with other workers and stand for better standards of living and workplace rights. Don’t blame the victim when the system itself is the problem.
Read More →American Overkill
The new Sheriff is patrolling the global street, pulling out his guns at every turn. Unconcerned about overkill, a more secure world through superior American firepower seems unlikely.
Read More →Common cause in civilian ‘collateral damage’ in Afghanistan or London
Nicky Hager and John Stephenson’s new book, Hit and Run, claims the NZ SAS carried out a revenge raid on an Afghani village which killed six and injured 15 civilians, including women and children. In response, the jaded and inhumane say ‘civilians die in war’, ‘human collateral damage is inevitable’.
Read More →Industrial scale egg production is cruel, that’s the real problem
The fact that most of the billion eggs produced and sold in New Zealand are generated through the cruel mistreatment and industrial commodification of hens, is a greater issue than that a relatively smaller percentage of them were mislabeled as free range when in fact they were from cages.
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