For the love of Christ – hit greedy NZ Banks with a financial transaction tax!!!

ByMartyn Bradbury

Look at the outrageous profits the NZ banks are bleeding us dry with….

…once upon a time when the Left were more focused on class and economics, we would have had a plethora of responses to this madness.

Sadly the entire movement is infected by woke identify politics with no intellectual muscle beyond micro aggression policing and cancelling people on Twitter.

As economic anxiety builds for the working classes in NZ, look at the NZ political left’s response.

  • Gerrymandering the Sexual assault laws so that any man accused of rape is convicted.
  • Climate change emergency declaration that doesn’t do anything.
  • Strangling off free speech with a blasphemy law and criminalizing the misuse of pronouns.
  • Ending Gay Conversion therapy that proponents can’t quantify.
  • Critical Racism theory in 0range Tamariki.

For the 190000 children in poverty, 24000 on emergency housing wait lists and generations locked out of home ownership, the NZ Left’s response is woke wankery.

Rather than focus on jobs, houses and poverty (because they are hard) we get middle class virtue signals.

Let’s remind you of the holy trinity of woke identity politics dogma.

In the name of the non-binary mother, non-binary daughter and the monthly ghost: All white people are irredeemable racists, all men are rapists and anyone defending free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi.

The Right look for recruits, the Left look for traitors and right now, the dangerous far right are winning.

Thanks to middle class identity politics, the Left have spent more energy since 2016 on fighting heteronormative white cis male patriarchy than capitalism.

Look at this…

…In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth

By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals

In 2018, it was 42

In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.

And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.

This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth!

Labour have failed us over 4 years because they had no plan to scare the public service into serving the public.

They need 5 big Radical Centre ideas that actually do more than woke virtue signalling to challenge inequality and poverty .

1 – Financial Transaction Tax – TAX BANKS!

Society needs money for social infrastructure and to rapidly adapt to the climate crisis. It is unacceptable that citizens pay more tax. A Financial Transaction Tax set at .001 cent would capture all those speculators who trade and the banks that enable their gambling. Hit the corporates with this tax and the beauty is that it’s unavoidable because every electronic financial transaction is recorded. This would see billions available each year and start to push back on corporate power.

2 – Use Public Works Act to seize 90% of all golf courses in Auckland.

The Housing crisis needs an immediate solution, not more empty promises. Using the Public Works Act, central Government should seize 90% of golf courses in Auckland and build a mix of state houses and first time home buyer owner/occupier tiny houses using the best environmental & urban design housing. Fuck the golfers. We could solve homelessness, provide extra resources to these new communities while giving first home buyers an immediate way into the housing market. Why not turn golfing privilege into economic justice?

3 – Feed the bloody kids – all of them!

Not just some bullshit unhealthy food, I’m talking community garden, local produce, parents paid to come in and help serve up the most nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school we can provide. To actually care about our children and set standards of what is most healthy for us. Hungry children can’t learn and removing this cost from the poorest parents pockets would do more to put money back into those pockets than any welfare increase would do without getting clawed back by MSD. We would build community at schools, while providing healthy food to our kids, while putting money into the poorest parents. Make this universal.

4 – Legalize Cannabis

The hundreds of millions in tax revenues, the 5000 jobs, the weakening of gangs plus the means to move criminals out of the black market into law abiding jobs all combine to the need for a State regulated industry that will benefit everyone. A stoned nation is far less violent than a drunk one, I’m certain it would reduce the terrible culture of rage we live with in this country.

5 – Free Public Transport

You want Aucklanders to get out of their cars? Make public transport free. Again this would help save the poor money and force change by providing and enormous incentive to get people out of their polluting cars.

This Government is failing in every indicator except keeping us safe from Covid but that’s not enough.

What is required are some big ideas with immediate pay off that enables the Government to bypass the public service and their fiefdoms.

Keeping Covid out isn’t enough. Those 190000 kids in poverty, those 24000 on emergency housing wait lists and the generations locked out of home ownership deserve better.

We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.

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27 Comments

  2. Come now, Michael Wood has unveiled plans so complex and so expensive for light rail in Auckland that would put NASA in the shade.

    And what the actual fuck happened to the government cracking down on the Paywave rort run by our banking cartel? As if their massive aren’t already enough. Recall their concern, their call to action?

    We’ve just gone through and still are in the eternal lockdown in Auckland where Covid thrives and unlike last time when there banks waved their rip off fees, this time we’ve been pushing buttons on EFTPOS terminals that’s been touched by the last Covid victim because small business can’t afford to pay the extortion ransom from banks!

    This absolutely avoidable situation and hopeless lack in of delivery of a stated plan by our government is so very typical of them!

  3. Scary stuff. And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.

    It’s hard to tax the top 0.001% and so much easier to tax the middle class who are getting poorer as the basics like water and food are increasingly owned by the 0.001% and remain untaxed.

    Just look at the song and dance about emissions and largely ignoring cracking down on the 100 companies contributing 71% of those emissions. Instead world leaders and advisors hypocritically help the polluters to continue to dominate and pollute by subsidising them while focusing on consumer behaviour (while the green movement are surveilled instead) not the major contributors of pollution. Then they wonder why people are turning away from trusting governments.

    Democrats have led the global decline in the west by trade agreements that help the biggest companies and destroy jobs in their countries like in the US. I’m sure China is thankful that the west gifted them all the money for manufacturing, so that 20 people can own 50% of the planet. Then we get the rise of Trump who mostly got in because he cleverly understood that those who now have no jobs or stagnant jobs in the US and are living hand to mouth, and are voting against that.

    You have to wonder, what is the point to enable non democratic rise of governments, they already have so much money, but are enabled to continue to hoard the world’s assets, successfully.

    Should be a 70% top tax on assets held over 1 billion dollars by the same entity. Somehow there has to be a limit set on how much wealth someone is allowed to accumulate, because if you have money, you can essentially buy and control government policy now.

  4. Its not the banks fault? They just accidentally make horrifically high profits?

    Stop it Frank!

    1. It isn’t really the banks’ fault. It has more to do with the way our economy is structured; the banks just happen to be be well placed to make money so one can hardly blame them for doing so. Banks should be publicly owned utilities; or, failing that, should not be allowed to create ‘fiat money’. The byword for banking at the present time is ‘serendipity’.

      A land tax, rather than a FTT, would be useful since the land, effectively, belongs to all of us, and anyone claiming private ownership should be paying for the privilege. It would also allow governments to reap the benefits of capital gains on land.

      Making interest non deductible for tax purposes is a step in the right direction but the move should be extended to all businesses.

      Making sure that we have adequate affordable housing would also help.

  5. You had better vote for a National/ACT government in 2023 and then you will all get exactly what you deserve.

  7. In 2007 in a letter to the NZ Herald I said “This indicates the electorate has no interest in, or understanding of, the fact we are in danger of becoming a serfdom to overseas financial institutions.”
    We have arrived! Serfs working tirelessly for absentee (foreign) landlords, and what’s more we have knighted many of those that orchestrated this situation.
    The assets created by the blood sweat and tears of generations of AO/NZers sold off for a few pieces of silver so the toil of this and future generations can be sucked dry by these foreign landlords – I’d like to call them ‘leeches’ but the electorate has allowed this to be done to ourselves.
    We are currently standing aside and allowing Ampol (Australian oil refining and distributor) to buy our largest fuel distribution company Z Energy; a condition of the sale – close the Marsden Point refinery. Already bitumen has increased in price 40% – what a surprise!
    Along with foreign banks what percentage of profits from Forestry, Farming, Tourism (when at its peak), Manufacturing, and Fishing are flowing off-shore to foreign investors?

  10. There may be anger at the huge profit banks there would be more tears if a bank failed .

    1. But do we need the greedy Aussie banks hawking around 6 billion dollars out of our economy every year? Seriously? They literally must be laughing all the way to the bank. And the jokes on us.

  11. Harmful agribusiness is being funded by global banks

    Financial institutions provide a lifeline to agribusiness and all too often show little regard for deforestation risks. As our landmark report, Money to Burn showed, more than 300 banks and investors backed six of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune US$44 billion from 2013 to 2019.

    https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/how-banks-deforestation-and-climate-crisis-are-linked/

  13. And the only way to get that cashless society is to dismantle the current one, hence iris recognition , chips used already in Europe, population surveillance and the whole howling screaming lot of it. And somewheres in that mix, is covid, the square mile of London, and the western banking system.

    Larry Norman – I Wish We’d All Been Ready
    https://youtu.be/X1FcTKNXlO0?t=2

  14. as customers it is within our power to act and move away from the ozzie banks digitalization works both ways bank branches arent as important as they were so we really dont need all the over heads that come with these mega banks after 2008 american flock to there none profit credit unions german have there community banks there is nothing stopping us from voteing with our feet and we dont park saveing with banks any more

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