Bernard Hickey’s neutron bomb is what we need to fight the pandemic
As TDB has been pointing out from the very beginning, tis pandemic won’t just be a public health nightmare it will be an economic apocalypse.
When many of the NZ woke activists online were screaming criticism of the wuhan virus was xenophobic and racist, TDB was demanding a war time footing response.
- Immediate rationing protocols in all aspects of the market from petrol to food. Maximum purchase amounts need to be urgently put into place now because all that is stopping full blown panic buying is the belief that by 6am tomorrow the shelves are replenished, when that stops happening people will lose their shit, we must ensure that doesn’t happen by implementing 2 per customer styled rationing.
- The military needs to be mobilised and prepared to step in and ensure essential services can operate. And no Matt Nippert, that isn’t martial law.
- We should be considering releasing nonviolent prisoners out early because if the virus gets into our prison system they will not be able to save peoples lives in there.
- Food banks should be delivering to people, not having the people come to the food banks and warm clothing for winter should be distributed with those food parcels.
- Be prepared to quarantine suburbs and cities if the outbreak spreads.
On top of these responses, we need an economic response that matches the danger we face and targets certain groups within society.
- Dairy Farmers: They are up to their eyeballs in debt from dairy intensification. To get them to agree to helping everyone else, you need to help them. Guarantee Dairy farm debt on the agreement that they revert from Dairy to planting mixed forests.
- First home buyers: You can’t leave them for the wolves of the Market, guarantee their mortgages through Kiwibank.
- Mum and Dad’s investment property: You can’t wipe out an entire generations wealth base, again guarantee one property over the family house through KiwiBank.
- KiwiSaver contributions: The Government must look at tripling Kiwisaver contributions to rebuild peoples mutilated KiwiSaver accounts.
- Corporations: They will turn up with their golden begging bowls and beg for bail outs. If Labour do this over the well being of citizens, they risk enormous backlash.
- Banks: Only save Kiwibank (who will require a huge investment to scale it up) and TSB, the others can fail.
- Property Investors: Anyone with more than a family house plus one property investment can burn.
- Tax amnesty for small and medium business: They are the ones who will suffer the most, allow a tax amnesty with the usual penalties cancelled.
- Welfare: Everyone will be scrambling for some type of welfare, it will need to be increased, and the draconian punitive crap dumped.
- Immigration Freeze: We will need to freeze immigration at a time of economic crisis because everyone will be fleeing.
- Rent Freeze: Don’t allow greedy Landlords to benefit from a crisis.
- Minimum Wage Freeze: We can’t seriously be asking small business to pay people more as the economy collapses.
Bernard Hickey goes further…
The neutron bomb wrecking the global economy
We should start thinking about how to deal with a global depression, starting with massive public works projects and an NZ Super-style Universal Basic Income for all funded by the Reserve Bank buying of Government bonds.
…Bernard is correct, the Economic Depression we are facing is unprecedented…
Coronavirus: The world’s largest economy has come to a sudden, screeching halt
Never before has the US economy screeched to such a sudden, violent stop. Its shutdown has inflicted a case of whiplash on Americans who had enjoyed a decade-plus of gains from the job market, the stock market and a steady economic expansion. The economy is cratering into what looks like a deep recession. Millions will likely lose jobs by summer.
“The economy has never gone from healthy to disaster so quickly,” said Jason Furman, who was US President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser and is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
…and public health nightmare almost incalculable…
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled much more stringent measures to tackle the coronavirus outbreak after research indicated a quarter of a million people would have died under previous plans to control the pandemic.
The modelling study, by Imperial College, and led by Professor Neil Ferguson, an expert on the spread of infectious diseases, was published on March 16.
It helped change the British government’s position, according to those involved with the decision. The government said it had accelerated its plans on “the advice of the experts”.
…the response to this collision of mass death and economic apocalypse is to throw the baby out with the bath and go looking for the baby after the pandemic passes…
Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance
Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.
…the reality is that we can’t get back to any semblance of normalcy until we gain a vaccine and that’s still 12-18months away.
In the meantime, extreme quarantines and extreme economic responses are required.
The incredibly cautious Grant Robertson needs to adopt extreme measures that require vision not management and he needs them now.
The Government must put together an urgent blue sky task force of our best economists and economic thinkers to generate ideas, and they must do it now.
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TDB Team 2020.
Hunger games
All under the guise of a pandemic.
Destruction of the middle class leaving only the Elite and the rest.
May as well nominate Matt McCarten and Mathew Hooton to the group of thinkers for a bit of balance.
Both useless up themselves prats!
I choose them because they’ve got proven track records of winning and they know more players involved more intimatelay than even The Prime Minister. Even if you thought they were prats why wouldn’t you have them around?
“We should start thinking about how to deal with a global depression, starting with massive public works projects and an NZ Super-style Universal Basic Income for all funded by the Reserve Bank buying of Government bonds.”
The question is ” why should it be funded by buying government bonds?” This way it is a debt owed by the government (that means us including the recipients of the UBI ) to the reserve bank which will one day have to be paid back. It should be issued as fiat money not as debt or it will solve nothing.
D J S
The RBNZ can forgive the debt and should strategically when the private bankster cabal has moved on.
Here’s a sneak preview of what’s to come.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/?fbclid=IwAR3Y-X62T8Clzi66mKIKHBUmX4iPnpGKUQ-R2W7bmVszJbL5n22GaIW8JlY
I would say that a more balanced and less fear mongering Perspective with some actual medical input could be got elsewhere. There are known problems with false positives from the corona virus test giving positives for people that have just the run of the mill corona virus that is already common. Also, we have never had such massive testing for a virus at the time of death so dont know what level of virus in the human body is normal through a population. Italy has 8000 flu deaths annually anyhow and the statistics show no increase in expected mortality rates. Died corona virus test positive is a totally different kettle of fish from died caused by corona virus. People die in large numbers every day. As John Pilger points out 3000 children die each day from Malaria but no pandemic is called. 26000 people die of starvation every day but who cares about that?
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Yes. Lets just bring the military out onto the streets. Increase their funding and just get used to being intimidated by guns. I mean, as Sean Penn says, they are sush paragons of virtue. Thank goodness there are still some journalists like Matt Nippert prepared to stick there neck out and make the obvious comparison to martial law. I’m pretty sure he wont be allowed to continue along those lines.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03/22/hollywood-celebrities-are-psyops-wrapped-in-human-skin/
Yes. Lets just bring the military out
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… ”As John Pilger points out 3000 children die each day from Malaria but no pandemic is called ”…
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Yes , and that is exactly what my crusty old biology tutor said when I was doing a Dip Sc and Tech … explaining as she traveled through Africa in her youth , furthermore saying the administration of such a simple thing as aspirin or some such other basic medicine would have prevented many deaths by easing the suffering of those infected…
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… ” 26000 people die of starvation every day but who cares about that? ” …
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Yes , and what do the neo liberals say about that when they like to gloat about their ideology of greed ,… what we DO know they DON’T say is that ” there’s no real investments to be made there so who cares?”…
Stop the corporate handouts and just put in NZ Super-style Universal Basic Income for NZ citizens only for the next 6- 12 months.
Much easier the the hodge podge they proposed which will probably see many struggle to provide the paperwork. (Because it seems to rely on economists thinking everyone in NZ is a bureaucrat and has excellent paper work skills which many poor don’t have).
Change the NZ State pensions so that you need to have lived in NZ for half you life to qualify for it (aka 32.5 years) or contributed over the 1 million in NZ to actually cover your pension and health care here.
Immigration has the phone ringing off the hook with the amount of people who want to access our free health care and pensions here, oh yes it our wonderful degrees https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11759352 and low paid jobs https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/108356004/the-big-scam-5000-cash-buys-you-a-job drawing them here or our job shortages drawing them here, (sarcasm). https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1808/S00537/oh-thats-where-they-get-their-profits-from.htm.
It is predicted that senior Asian New Zealanders will almost triple from 59,500 to 171,900 in the next 14 years. And they don’t have to have legally paid any taxes in NZ to qualify which is all fine apparently from our ‘poverty’ and ‘economic’ commentators it’s actually all the fault of the ‘rich’ local taxpayers apparently.
The crazy thing, is wasn’t Kiwis told that we needed immigration to help our pension system???? Like trickle down it all turned out to be the opposite, we were helping the rich migrants, international business get cheap workers and fraudulent people to get free money in NZ while expecting the kiwis to pay more un guaranteed Kiwisaver which is at the mercy of the stock markets (also helping international business) for the most part.
All the migrants I know think it is crazy that NZ offers all this free money and services to people who have just got here in the last few years. In their country they pay for health care and have to work for a state pension! But if it is free in NZ, why not take it and relocate more relatives to NZ to get paid out!
If we had a competent government and officials, shouldn’t the newcomers be paying the Kiwisaver and their health care and kids education paid for privately, and the locals get the state pension and their taxes goes into public health care, not the other way around?
It seems like Rogernomics it’s the opposite to logic, in global scams and neoliberalism.
Now we have corona virus which originated from China like many other virus like SARS (can someone please do puppet theatre on animal welfare and hygiene practises to the Chinese government) , and the spike in affected numbers show that if we had achieved lock down 2 weeks prior to foreign visitors coming to NZ, we probably would have been a lot better off in terms of both spread and economic effects from that spread.
We still had tourists, cruise ships and non residents wandering about recently, not to mention everyone else, now we have community spread by the sounds of it!
corona virus proliferated in the wet market of Wuhan but originated out of China.
Geneticist from three major countries have examined samples from around the world ( except the USA who will not cooperate ?????) and the conclusion of each group is that the virus did not originate in China.
Japan and Taiwan are not exactly friends of China so worked independently, but the evidence is clear and conclusive.
What has the USA got to hide.
I needed a laugh today and this one’s a ripper! Thanks a million John. Be sure to keep the ridiculous bullshit flowing!
USA have not made their data available to other agencies.
Check it, and please do.
Some American scientist seem free to admit that the genome sequence is not one that could occur in the wild but is likely to be an altered genomes closely related to published data of some years ago relating to laboratory work.
How you join the dots is up to you how you use the word ridiculous.
If you mean it I will not laugh. Do the research and be critical.
Welll said martyn,
We needed to print money long before today like treasury are now waking up to, (thanks to Winston Peters direction here.)
Labour founder Michael Joseph Savage did this back in 1935 when he pullled NZ out of the deep depression of 1929.
he printed money to begin a massive building program with a “public works program” to buiild homes, railways, forestry and other infrustructure to give massive job opportunities.
We are ow entering this now, when job losses rise steeply as they will this year.
We must print $300 Billion so ‘everyone’ working/ noot working and all retired are all given a reasonable ‘inccome to survive through the gathering storm to spend to keep the economy going..
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120485461/coronavirus–reserve-bank-gets-approval-for-30b-spendup-to-protect-economy
I think MOH is following the WHO line that we only do what is possible- that being defined as what business will accept. Basically business doesn’t care a shit about the impact of CV on the working people.
They hide behind the bullshit that to act otherwise is “authoritarian”. Tell that to the first Labour Government and it Public Safety Conservation Act which they used during the war and to smash the 1951 Lockout.
They dominate the air waves with their crazy demands for bailouts refusing to face the reality that their bankruptcy is due to dying capitalism and its destruction of the ecosystem.
Note the main argument against closing schools now is taking health workers out of action. Bullshit, the health workers are calling for it, teachers (not officials) are calling for it, but MOH is stuck in the bureaucratic mindset.
Today David Skegg follows up on Michael Baker’s weeks of appealing for fast and decisive action, stating that the advisory committee is chaired by a MOH boffin, and only has one epidemiologist on it. And no transparency here unlike Boris’s crony regime.
Souixsie Wiles tells RNZ that Baker is only one epidemiologist and Govt is listening to their equally qualified experts.
For weeks it has been obvious that China, Taiwan and S.Korea acted quickly with screening and testing with good effect. Italy and now the rest of Europe and USA did not and are dying proof of the contrary.
Neil Ferguson and his crew at Imperial College and the Hammer and Dance crew in the US tell it like it is. Lockdown now, kill the virus, and live to fight over what society we want to live in afterwards.
Let it not be the ‘new normal’ where terminal capitalism survives as zombie capitalism only because it gets a transfusion of the blood of the working people.
Rather the socialism of the working people rise up over the dead bodies of the zombie banks and corporations.
So lets learn from the blatant play by business and government to take the mitigation course of certain destruction so that business bailouts have time to bed in, while workers are scared into quarantines by state of emergencies and curfews.
In India today business is making big bucks from this pandemic while Modi is imposing a curfew backed by the military against workers.
Workers can resist this by backing their health workers, and striking for the nationalisation (rather than bailout) of banks and big industry, full funding of public health, jobs for all, state housing, education etc.
Dave’s comments need to get wide, er, transmission! He distills the current morass into a few sentences with clear avenues for direct working class action.