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.
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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What To Do About Window-Washers
The people engaging in window-washing are, for the most part, unemployed and to a certain extent possibly unemployable. They may be subsisting on a benefit [which, let’s remember, even the Minister of Social Development herself implicitly stated one couldn’t survive on without engaging in criminal behavior]; and one has to wonder – if prevented from attempting to earn a bit of extra cash window-washing, where else might they go in order to try and make ends meet.
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Battle For The Heartland: Understanding America’s Unrelenting Hostility Towards All Things Russian
WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON?! As events in the Middle East spiral out of control, and the prospect of a shooting war between the United States and Russia moves from possible to probable, that’s the question more and more people are asking.
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Latest West Papua journalist blacklisting another serious violation by Indonesia
The blacklisting of Jack Hewson, a freelance journalist working for Al Jazeera, shows the Indonesian government’s paranoia towards foreign journalists.
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New Rules on the Global Economy
The government’s attempts to revive the Trade Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) have, as predicted, failed. Instead, the government is now putting its faith in negotiating numerous Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It’s more of the same, ignoring the lessons from the TPPA debacle.
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Trumpwatch: One minute closer to midnight on the Doomsday Clock
Despite a previous poison gas attack in Ghouta, Syria in 2013 – for which the Assad regime was implicated, but not proven – there is little actual firm evidence that the Syrian government was responsible for the gassing at Khan Sheikhoun on 7 April.
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Why Bill English is wrong to support Trump’s air strike on Syria
The rapidity with which Bill English fell in behind Trump’s unilateral strike on Syria shows how little the NZ government values the UN Security Council, despite just having completed two years on it. New Zealand sidelined the Security Council and supported a US strike contravening the UN Charter. Article 51 of the Charter allows one nation to strike another only in “self-defence”. America wasn’t being attacked by Syria.
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Doug Myers, morality and business
Across the media Myers is being praised as a business leader and philanthropist yet he made money not through his own efforts but through using his massive inherited wealth to exploit the free-market economic policies he championed, as a leading light in the Business Roundtable, alongside the Labour Party of the 1980s. That wealth he gained was at the expense of middle and low-income New Zealanders who continue to struggle today to provide that triple lining to the pockets of the super wealthy.
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WTF: Why Trump Fired – The Tomahawks Of April
The world now waits and watches with amply baited breath to see what Putin and Russia will say or do in response. Not for the first time, the hopes for continued (broad) peace in our time rest upon burly Russian shoulders and pragmatic Slavic restraint.
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VIDEO: CAFCA’s Murray Horton on NZ’s independence and foreign policy
In the era of President Donald Trump in the US, CAFCA’s Murray Horton provides a hard look at Aotearoa’s place in the world. And he asks the question – why are we still a loyal member of the American Empire?