Has it occurred to anyone that Democracy isn’t working? Participation Power vs Wealth Power
Interesting argument from American political scientist Jeffrey Winters that Democracy is failing because the mega wealthy control the political process, a situation that is obvious in NZ with National and NZFirst crony capitalism infecting every piece of legislation.
We have mistaken Participation Power as the driver of democracy when really it’s Wealth Power…
Fewer than 60,000 people — 0.001% of the world’s population — control three times as much wealth as half of humanity. This statistic from the World Inequality Report shows the extreme inequality in our modern world. Political scientist Jeffrey Winters argues that, while the wealthy have dominated the masses throughout history, the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizen today is even greater than during Imperial Rome. In his new book, Winters points out one key difference: Today, this disparity is often achieved and maintained through democratic means.
…this is why taxing the mega wealthy is so important for the survival of democracy and why the Greens and Te Pati Māori economic policy is so crucial because they are the only ones recognising the danger in front of us with policies aimed at taxing the mega wealthy.
Making Billionaires pay for the society that built them is righteous not envy!
The Right argue that rather than taxing more, we have to grow the pie, but the pie is shrinking and demanding people suffer waiting for it to grow isn’t much of an election campaign – ‘Endure more pain’ isn’t as great a slogan as ‘tax the rich’ right?
NBR rich list tells us 26 Billionaires in NZ, many of them douchebags of the most worst kind, why shouldn’t Billionaire douchebags pay a Billionaire douchebag tax?
Billionaire, Steve Jobs said, and I quote…
“I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I used. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on.
I put to you that Billionaires stand upon the shoulders of a society and draws their wealth and power from that society with minimal obligations placed upon them. They have benefitted from an educated civil society but want to pay sweet bugger all for its upkeep!
This Green Party tax policy is as close to recognising that reality as possible.
Economic Justice in an egalitarian democracy demands no less!
Rich people will kill for a tax cut.
Elon Musk has denied that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he was placed in charge of by Donald Trump caused child fatalities, dismissing Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols study predicting 4.5 million deaths by 2030 due to USAID funding cuts . Musk claimed on X that the death toll was “a total lie” and challenged critics to cite a single named victim.
From Common Dreams:
Journalists Set the Record Straight After Musk Claims ‘Not a Single’ Child Died From DOGE’s USAID Cuts
Stephen Prager
Jun 29, 2026
https://www.commondreams.org/news/musk-dead-children-usaid
…..the newly minted trillionaire has repeatedly asserted that the claim that he is responsible for the deaths of kids is “a total lie.”
…….Even after being presented with direct evidence to the contrary, Musk continued to insist on Sunday that critics of his cuts to USAID “cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose reporting on the impacts of the sudden aid cuts was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, responded that he could give Musk a list of “many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.”
He listed the names of just a few of the people whose cases he had witnessed firsthand, which are recounted in greater depth in his reports. As Kristoff wrote:
Yamah Freeman was a [21-year-old] woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of your cuts in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after you interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when you cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to him.
“I could go on and on,” Kristof continued, “In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts.”……
And why did Elon Musk kill all these people?
The preventable deaths of all these people allowed billionaire president Donald Trump to afford to give Musk and other billionaiires a massive tax cut.
From Google:
\….The core legislation delivered a $117 billion tax benefit to the richest 1 percent in 2026 alone, with the top 0.1 percent projected to receive an average tax cut of $309,000 by 2029.
The Treasury Department bypassed Congress to implement additional targeted tax cuts for billion-dollar corporations and private equity firms.
To help bankroll the tax cuts, the legislation mandates nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the Medicaid health care program and triggers multi-billion dollar sequestrations impacting Medicare.
While affluent US families reaped permanent tax relief, US households earning under $30,000 face net tax increases by 2029…..
Tax The Rich
The plutocracy kills kids
Elon Musk has denied that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he was placed in charge of by Donald Trump caused child fatalities, dismissing Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols study predicting 4.5 million deaths by 2030 due to USAID funding cuts . Musk claimed on X that the death toll was “a total lie” and challenged critics to cite a single named victim.
From Common Dreams:
Journalists Set the Record Straight After Musk Claims ‘Not a Single’ Child Died From DOGE’s USAID Cuts
Stephen Prager
Jun 29, 2026
https://www.commondreams.org/news/musk-dead-children-usaid
…..the newly minted trillionaire has repeatedly asserted that the claim that he is responsible for the deaths of kids is “a total lie.”
…….Even after being presented with direct evidence to the contrary, Musk continued to insist on Sunday that critics of his cuts to USAID “cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose reporting on the impacts of the sudden aid cuts was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, responded that he could give Musk a list of “many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.”
He listed the names of just a few of the people whose cases he had witnessed firsthand, which are recounted in greater depth in his reports. As Kristoff wrote:
Yamah Freeman was a [21-year-old] woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of your cuts in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after you interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when you cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to him.
“I could go on and on,” Kristof continued, “In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts.”……
And why did Elon Musk kill all these people?
The preventable deaths of all these people allowed billionaire president Donald Trump to afford to give Musk and other billionaiires a massive tax cut.
From Google:
\….The core legislation delivered a $117 billion tax benefit to the richest 1 percent in 2026 alone, with the top 0.1 percent projected to receive an average tax cut of $309,000 by 2029.
The Treasury Department bypassed Congress to implement additional targeted tax cuts for billion-dollar corporations and private equity firms.
To help bankroll the tax cuts, the legislation mandates nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the Medicaid health care program and triggers multi-billion dollar sequestrations impacting Medicare.
While affluent US families reaped permanent tax relief, US households earning under $30,000 face net tax increases by 2029…..
Tax The Rich
“We have mistaken Participation Power as the driver of democracy when really it’s Wealth Power” Martyn Bradbury
The democratic rights that we have in New Zealand, universal sufferage, the right to strike, the right to protest, the right to free speech, all these rights were hard fought for in the past, often against violent capitalist opposition, and all these rights are still under capitalist attack in the present.
The opposite of capitalism is not communism. The opposite of capitalism is democracy.
The less democracy there is in a societry the better capitalism does.
Capitalism is going gangbusters in Communist China.
Hurun Global Rich List, records that China has 1,110 billionaires (USD), this makes China the country with the highest number of billionaires in the world.
(The USA is second, with 989 billionaires, India is in third place with 205 billionaires)
As of 2025, the capital city of communist China, Beijing, is home to 68 billionaires (USD). Beijing’s richest resident is Lei Jun, the owner of the Xiaomi electric car manufacturing company. Lei Jun has an estimated net worth ranging between $20 billion and $46 billion (USD) .The cumulative net worth of Beijing’s billionaires at a rough estimate is $273 billion (USD).
China’s largest city Shanghai, is home to 120 billionaires (USD), Shanghai’s richest Resident is the co-founder of Temu, Colin Huang. Colin Huang’s fortune is valued at between $36 billion to $42+ billion (USD).
Capitalism is going gangbusters in Communist China because, well, there is no such thing as a communist China. “Communist China” is the way empire loves to view and talk about China…otherwise, China currently has a communist party in Govt, this is the extent of communism in China. As such, their form of capitalism has helped lift over half their population out of poverty. Their form of capitalism still maintains control of their banking system – something that really, really rankles empire – this allows business to both flourish and hold a competitive advantage over the more indebted West. Their form of capitalism has not grown because of a lack of democracy, their form of capitalism has grown because Govt still maintains a level of control over business, a level of control that empire, that the West, well n truly kicked to the curb with the adoption of neoliberal economic policy back in the 70’s, early 80’s.
Yes, it is still far from ideal, as evidenced by the rise of the billionaire class in China, but again, it is not the lack of democracy that is fueling capitalism in China, this is just a very, very convenient, empire-led talking point, if not an outright slur on the type of capitalism China has chosen to adopt relative to the West.
AO’s trolling on behalf of the imperialist Putin regime is extended to sucking up to the repressive dictator for life Xi Jinping and his regime. AO, is not one to miss an opportunity to praise a repressive undemocratic imperialist dictatorship.
“….. it is not the lack of democracy that is fueling capitalism in China, this is just a very, very convenient, empire-led talking point, if not an outright slur on the type of capitalism China has chosen to adopt relative to the West.” A O
It is exactly the lack of democracy that is fueling capitalism in China.
Similar to the Russian Federation, China is a multi-ethnic state. Similar to the Russian Federation, China maintains a strict system of internal colonialist exploitation of its people in its North Western regions to enrich the coastal and central metropole. The inequities and control that Western imperialist nations impose on third world countries, China lacking external colonies exploits its Northwestern provinces, which are ruled like internal colonies, the Communist party impose internal passports and internal borders, maintaining strict control of internal movement of subject colonial workers within China.
Though it has helped the Communist Party in Beijing keep control the far flung outer regions, it is not central government control of China’s banks that has been behind China’s spectacular growth, it is the system of internal imperialism, the exploitation of disposable (internal) migrant bond labour, working in the vast factories within the metropol on short term fixed .bonded labour contracts without full citizenship rights, that fuels Chinese capitalism..
Similar to the imperialist powers that exploit external colonies and neo-colonies, China’s system of internal imperialism, is dependent on repression bond labour and slave labour.
https://icnacsj.org/forced-uyghur-labor-cotton/?
Xinjiang in North West China is populated by the Uyghur people, and is China’s largest internal region. After the retreat of the Imperial Japanese forces the Uyghurs declared Xinjian independence in 1944, only to be recolonised in 1949 by the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing. Xinjiang, like Tibet, China’s other internal colony, is officially called an autonomous region, but in reality, both regions are subjected to repression and exploitation by the central communist dictatorship in Beijing.
There’s only one imperialist power in the world, and that it is the entire Western world, spearheaded, now days, by the USA. And in order to maintain the status quo, to maintain our imperial status, to maintain primacy over the entire world, they/we are raging war on the rest of the world. The common denominator behind every war in the world today is us, not Russia, nor China, or Iran, it is us. And the man that leads us all, he does not hide what we really are, probably the only good thing about our orange commander. And no amount of looking outwards can hide what we, ourselves, are doing to the world.
As an adjunct to that everyone should be forced to listen to the latest podcast of ‘The Dairy of a CEO’ where highly successful fund manager for 60years, climate change alarm bell ringer and philanthropist, 87 year old Jeremy Grantham is interviewed and spells out very succinctly the trouble the world is in.
The opposite of capitalism isn’t communism.
The opposite of capitalism is democracy.
The rise of MMP in goose step with neoliberalism was the nail in the coffin of what we believed was our democracy.
Mandate the bloody vote, lower the voting age to sixteen then ask the Crown to very publicly audit the IRD, the Reserve Bank, retail banking generally and our multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires.
Capitalisim the worlds biggest PONZI scheme .wHERE IS THE COMMERCE COMMISION
Grow the income pie. Yeah that happens and you get an extra slice of salami meanwhile a few get billions of extra slices. Be Happy.
Your sitting at an asset table where everyone in NZ used to get a plate but now the plan is the head of the table never hands out the plates. Own Nothing.
“Participation Power vs Wealth Power”…..Democracy, at its best, is all about these two powers fighting against each other, basically, keeping each other in check. But some time in the 70’s and 80’s the former was largely dismantled leaving the latter to run free, hence the rise of economic inequality and the proliferation of the billionaire class. This, according to some chap in the UK (don’t recall his name) who explained this dynamic in an interview. It makes sense to me.
Therefore, we the people, have to unite – somehow – and fully participate in the democratic process to challenge the hold that big money has over the political class, if we are to achieve what we desire. How the fcuk do we do this in the fragmented, highly indebted, misinformed age that we live in now? That’s the question!
Yes, I completely agree with the Green/ TPM view of future taxation. The fact that something like 97 percent of us will be better off because of it is hard to argue against.
Interestingly both Labour and TOP fail to see what is clear to the rest of us.
yes by far the best policies but people dont bother to read them because one lot are brown so they must be uneducated ,so what would they know .The greens suffer from long term bashing in the media and as my friend keeps telling me they are nuters .When I asked if he had read their policy he flat out said no why would i .I suggested he further his education and read the policies of TPM,GREENS AND OPPORTUNITY ,because he may find they stand for all of NZ not the 10% sorted .I also suggested he might like to sit down and look in the mirror and ask himself if he is sorted .He upon examination realised he was in fact close to ending up living under a bridge ,being a pensioner renting his home .Another term of COC and he may well be under the bridge .
If the COC get in again they will be charging for places under the bridge. The minor left parties need a decent vote to give them some negotiating power as Labour is unlikely to see the light without a big push.
“inequality”, an ugly word that means lack of fairness, equality or even distribution! Alongside it is “democracy”, which I seem to recall we also once had! When 0.001% of the world’s population conrols 3x as much wealth as half of humanity it clearly shows our current systems are NOT WORKING, at least for most of us! Everyone needs to pay their fair share of costs/taxes, so pay rates, especially for the workers, need to catch up with the enormous increases in the top-feeder salaries. Greed has been the driver of this huge gap and no one who has gained from this should feel proud. Of course if you have studied hard and paid for a degree for several years, you should be paid more, however when Real Estate Agents, Sales People and Landlords are some of our top earners, there is something hugely wrong out there. Less, greed, more ‘caring’ and ‘sharing of the load’, would go a long way to sorting some of this vile megalomaniac behaviour. We don’t all get the same chances in life, but what’s going on now is ridiculous and unfair – it simply can’t continue.