When the state-owned railways Prebble had pledged to save were being “corporatized” (i.e. readied for sale to private buyers) a story began doing the rounds which Labour insiders always insisted came from Prebble’s Office. It was “The Story of the Disappearing Bulldozer”.
THE QUESTION CONFRONTING the Democratic Party when it next takes control of the White House will, simply, be: “What now?” The next Democratic President will likely enter office with the two most powerful Islamic nations in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, locked in a nuclear arms race. Faced with the prospect of two bitter foes acquiring the means to wipe it off the face of the earth, Israel (which already possesses its own nuclear arsenal) will be screaming at the new Democratic administration to: “Do something – or we will!” Doing something will be unavoidable – but what is it that the United States should do?
WHAT HAPPENED this morning (9/5/18) has yet to be fully understood by the peoples of the world. Upon learning of President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, the temptation to simply roll one’s eyes and shake one’s head was hard to resist. Many would have recalled Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and assumed his latest move was in a similar vein.
EMMANUEL MACRON will be hoping that Mark Twain was wrong about history. In the French President’s ears, the celebrated American novelist’s famous observation that although history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes, can hardly be reassuring.
THE SPEED at which the Right is mutating is nowhere more evident than in Donald Trump’s America. One has only to examine the tensions within the American Republican Party to get some measure of its disarray. In spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government, the Republicans have never looked more fractious. Fewer and fewer on the right are convinced that politics-as-usual is any longer capable of delivering the changes they seek.
If you have ever wondered why Peters attracts so much venom from practically the entire political class: politicians, journalists, civil servants and business lobbyists; it’s because they understand that any politician who pledges to fulfil his party’s promises by reintroducing a “hands-on” approach to economic management cannot avoid exposing the undemocratic coding at the core of government management in New Zealand.
I DON’T KNOW which is more embarrassing: to have a lawyer called Trotter defending a woman who prostituted her own daughter; or a PhD history candidate called Trotter “Exploring the Kiwi connection as Israel turns 70”.
The position of Jacinda’s government is not made any easier by elements within the news media who act as if the Right’s suspicion and resentment is, in some unexplained way, justified. In spite of the fact that the Labour-NZF-Green government has been in office barely six months, and ignoring the almost daily revelations of the previous government’s extraordinary derelictions and mismanagement, they lash Jacinda’s ministers as if they alone are responsible for the fact that the country’s infrastructure is, quite literally, rotting away.
THE BIGGEST THREAT to NZ First’s and the Greens’ political survival is Labour deciding that it doesn’t need them.
Everything now points to another such detonation being imminent. Pumped-up by the steady expansion of global liquidity the world’s stockmarkets have climbed to giddy and unprecedented heights. Over the last few weeks, however, the value of the stocks and shares traded on the world’s exchanges has fluctuated wildly. Such volatility, warns Pettifor, almost always precedes a catastrophic market crash.