One minute to midnight?
At the time of this blogpost being written, the US has not initiated a military response in Syria. As at midnight of 12 April, a little blue marble called Planet Earth is still in one piece…
Setting the Agenda
Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
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Open letter to new Government: How to find $36 billion for health spending and lower ACC levies at the same time
I explained a few weeks ago that the government had $36 billion in an investment account that could be taken and used to fund the desperate improvements we need in the health sector. They could do this without breaching their self-imposed fiscal responsibility rules.
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Joe Carolan on the nurses strike
Joe Carolan on the nurses strike
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Waiting For The Market’s Music To Stop
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.
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Newsflash: apparently our public hospital system is in crisis?!
Regardless of headlines, the content confirmed years of media reports and countless blogposts on The Daily Blog, The Standard, and elsewhere, that New Zealand’s public healthcare system was critically under-funded; over-stretched; and staff were burning out from over-work. The story confirmed nine years of National’s gross under-funding and mis-management of the health system as successive ministers demanded that DHB managers and health-workers “do more with less”;
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MUST READ: Russian Spy Drama Symptom of and Distraction From Bigger Geopolitical Play
I prefer to live in a country that makes its international relations decisions based on firm, independent evidence rather than speculation. Let’s not forget the rush to war based on allegations of Weapons of Mass Destruction. It doesn’t have to be ‘you’re either with us or you’re against us’, it can be a case of wait and see – at least until Wednesday when the UN Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons releases its report into the incident.
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Land Day after three months of escalating Israeli violence in Gaza
On 30 March 2018, Good Friday, thousands of unarmed Palestinians gathered to take part in a well-publicised, non-violent annual protest, known as the Great March of Return. The event commemorates the day in 1976 when the lives of six Palestinians were taken by Israeli forces for daring to protest in a general strike against 30 years of repression and dispossession.
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Russia: An Alternative View
BEFORE CRITICISING THOSE who continue to treat Russia as an “evil empire”, I should first explain why I don’t. It’s not only because I know that without the extraordinary sacrifices of the Russian people during the Second World War (twenty million dead!) the United States and British Empire losses would have been much, much higher.
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Radio silence after massacre on the border of Gaza
The people of Gaza are prisoners in a giant cage made by Israel. And Israel is shooting at them.
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MUST READ: Piling-On The Pressure
Can liberal democracy survive if the news media abandons evidence-based judgement and simply piles-on “as one” against a prime minister and her government? And what if it isn’t just the timing that’s consistent, but the message as well? What then? How is the public to avoid the impression that the news media is rooting for one side and not the other?