Bad Damien Grant! Bad!
Right wing hate monster, barely legal fireworks enthusiast and baby horse killer, Damien Grant, is a lovely chap. He’s funny, a wonderful father and great to have a beer with, however his latest column about the Green Party is so far off the mark, he should write an immediate apology for wasting everyones time for having to read it and promise to hand himself in when the socialist revolution comes to pass so we don’t have to waste any time searching for him during the execution/purge phase of the uprising.
Damien is so right wing that he thinks anything to the right of Caligula is communism, so he views the Greens as the living embodiment of Marx…
Unfortunately, there has been a merging of environmental and other political agendas. In his submission to cabinet in July, Climate Change minister James Shaw states openly that, “we are committed to a transition to a net-zero emissions economy that is just and inclusive”, rather than just being “committed to a net-zero emissions economy”.
He continues, “The transition will require significant economic transformation”.
And this, dear readers, is the problem. Shaw and his comrades have a vision of a different economic model, one that sane people have tunnelled under barbed wire fences to escape. Alas, the sacrifice required to achieve this gender-fluid post-colonial paradise requires a reversal of most of the economic gains of the last 50 years.
…oh sweet Jesus Damien. If fucking only!
The Greens actual economic model is pure free market liberalism in gender neutral drag – all they want to do is include the price of pollution in the cost & let market do the rest.
Have you ever been to a Green Party conference? It’s a whiter shade of beige. These days it’s wall to wall with ‘ethical entrepreneurs’ that ugly middle class blue-green colour that bruises turn after a severe beating.
They all see NZ’s pure clean reputation as an economic branding advantage and they want the Greens to champion that cause. If you actually read the Green Party economics policy, it’s about setting the market conditions to allow the free market to work towards that benefit, pretending that they would usher in some type of socialist heaven is such a misreading of the truth it sounds more like Fox News propaganda than political insight.
The Greens stopped being a socialist party the second Sue Bradford lost the co-leadership race in 2009. From that point on it’s been a free market neoliberal economic agenda, James Shaw, a former corporate greenwash lobbyist to Coke-Cola signed up to Grant Robertson’s promise to be as economically ruthless as National for our corporate overlords without any problems whatsoever because such an agreement is of no issue to the Greens because they are pro-market, not anti.
They are a middle class vehicle for woke identity politics with a neoliberal economic policy framework, their only ‘state intervention’ is to force the cost of pollution into the final price SO THAT the market does the rest.
Damien’s view that the Greens are somehow ‘Lenin reborn’ is simply evidence of just how successful the 30 year neoliberal social, political and economic experiment in NZ has been. It is one of the most grotesque failures of intellectual debate that this 30 year experiment has never been seriously challenged by the Left in NZ and that the most ‘left wing’ political Party in NZ is only slightly less right wing than the Conservatives in Britain.
The NZ Left’s last true economic critic, Bruce Jesson, will be rolling in his grave.
nothing much to argue with/about there…
idiots like grant are solely invested in protecting their own appetites for destructive habits and consumption
What twaddle from Grant – does he really remotely understand what socialism or communism actually are. The Greeeeeens have moved way to the right since Rod & Jeanette’s time.
When the labour party has virtually the same immigration policy as Ukip, you know how far right it all is really. As for economic policy – labour and the greens could not be anymore further to the right than they currently are without completely alienating the electorate.
It is why the greens are continually stuck at 5% or thereabouts, economically they have been moving further and further to the right over the last 20 years. It’s one thing to speak nice kind words, and say you understand the pain. It’s quite another to then hold onto the policy of austerity, and continue to screw over the poor and dispossessed.
Do the greens ever wonder why people are fucked off with them? Probably not. It would actually mean they have to accept they made a mistake – somthing no political party is ever willing to do.
Climate Resilience meets Political Economy.
“In the realm of greed”
Quote
Capitalism is disenchanted and brings us the biggest fascism problem since the thirties.
“In 1967, economist John Kenneth Galbraith described how capitalism had transformed itself from a market society into a hierarchical system controlled by a corporate cartel: the “techno-structure,” as he called it. Led by a global elite that seized markets, set prices, and controlled demand, techno-structure replaced the goal of the New Deal – full employment – with that of growing gross domestic product (GDP).
Since the late 1970s, the techno-structure has expanded its power by embracing the black magic of ‘financialization’. An example of this is the transformation of automakers such as General Motors into large speculative financial companies that are also producing a few cars. Thus, the techno-structure increased its power by a dizzying factor and sustained asset growth for the few and lasting austerity policies for many.
This strengthened the dollar-based hegemony of the techno-structure to an extent that no macroeconomic approach can understand, because macroeconomics is per se confined to the economies of states – but the real thing has been happening in the balance sheets of global financiers since the 1990s.
We have to fight back.
While the techno-structure was salvaged by two governments, the US and China, the rulers blamed everything possible for the crisis: the cost of welfare systems, too high wages, supposedly too rigid labor markets or trade unions still fighting against the further precariatization of workers.
The self-destructive austerity policies of colossal proportions, for which the rulers were responsible, brought mass suffering and injustice.
That fantasy of an apolitical economic policy still cloaks the class struggle, with which the establishment pushes all risks and losses to the weak and requires them to “surrender to the inevitable.” Because a progressive internationalist alternative is lacking, the powerful of the techno-structure are driving entire populations into the open arms of a post-modern fascism.
Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the techno-structure is still at the controls of power. But the neoliberal myth is at an end – such as the idea that in a deregulated economy, the wishes of all could come true in a democratic way.
We have reached a point that corresponds to the 1930s – shortly after the crash, in the face of a fascist momentum. The urgent questions are tough.
But we all have no right to avoid answering them: when and how will we stand up against the nationalist International, which is spreading throughout the West by the techno-structure and its inherent crises?
Unquote (informal translation)
Yanis Varoufakis is co-founder of the DiEM25 movement and plans to compete with the MeRA25 party in Greece, where he was finance minister in 2015. Varoufakis is an economist and has, among other things, published the book ‘The Global Minotaur. America and the future of the world economy’.
Climate Resilience meets Political Economy.
Further reading:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-14/climate-change-should-be-political-but-not-partisan/
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-25/the-ecological-crisis-is-a-political-crisis/
And if you find time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLLoSzNn6xg
Why is that the Greens are the party that are continually attacked from all sides? It’s like everyone who doesn’t support the Greens have made the party their Jungian shadow. the embodiment of everything they hate and fear.
Because they’re incongruent. (Out of integrity.)
They no longer walk the talk.
Offer sweeping generalisations at least as wild as their detractors’.
Poorly advised.
Keep squandering their political capital.
Firmly subscribe to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Underdogs to be fought for have to be the proper sort of underdog. Patronising in the extreme. Even the women, about other women.
They stand for nothing. Spread far too thinly, and often incoherent.
Awfully urban.