MEDIA WATCH: Hooton, Gareth Morgan & Hoskings’ Death Cult Capitalism make them Vichy-Chamberlain cowards
The same right wing trolls screaming at Jacinda for shutting down the country this week were last month screaming at her for not shutting down the country last week.
Their criticism is sophistry masquerading as commentary and should be rejected with the force of projectile vomit.
Watching neoliberal devotees panic that this pandemic threatens their free market dogma is bringing out their blood lust of desperation to sacrifice the sick on their altar to Milton Friedman.
Hooton’s revolting Herald column, Gareth Morgan’s gruesome Morning Report interview and Hosking’s ghoulish Herald column last week all scream at the Government that 30 000 dead is fine as long as their sacred neoliberal economy is allowed to live.
They are Vichy-Chamberlain cowards who demand Jacinda should surrender to the virus so that their death Cult capitalism can continue because they fear the 34 year old neoliberal experiment is being exposed for the fraud it always was.
These death cult capitalists tell us that it is either or. We either save peoples lives OR we save the economy. That is a false choice, if we don’t save people’s lives, there won’t be an economy because it won’t function!
No one in NZ (other than Damien Grant) is crying out for Ayn Rand, Chicago School of Economics, or Adam Smith’s ungloved invisible hand, the frightened masses are begging the State to save them from this plague and that is what is terrifying neoliberal acolytes like Hooton, Hosking and Morgan.
It’s not ‘Socialism by stealth’ if the entire country is screaming out for it.
This pandemic is the wake up call we have needed, that free market capitalism’s illusion of ever expanding economic growth is a lie we simply can’t believe any longer. The Climate Crisis demands the changes the pandemic has enforced upon us, the challenge for the NZ Left is do we have an economic solution?
Sadly we do not.
Ever since Labour betrayed us in the 1980s, the Left have refused to reengage with the free market debate because they are fearful of the vicious idealogical war it inspired, this crisis demands those fears are pushed aside for serious reconsideration.
The wider progressive political movement has been hijacked by identity politics and ignored class and economics so that when the challenge to actually change the hegemonic neoliberal structure arrives, all they have to offer is complaints about how lockdown with their family triggers them and criticism of the virus is racist.
The Right are attempting to block any reform of their failed free market capitalism, luckily for them the Left are too busy deplatfoming one another to mount a counter attack.
A new Aotearoa Green Deal is a good starting point…
- Capitalist monopolies in energy, transport and finance have to be brought into public ownership and control. They should be subject to democratic plans drawn up by the whole community. Workers should have much stronger decision making powers within them.
- All economic sectors to be made take steps needed to decarbonise the economy as much as is needed to reach zero net emissions by 2030.
- Free and frequent public transport on electric buses and/or trains in all main cities.
- Health care and education for life should be free and universally accessible.
- Welfare, pensions, child allowances, should be universal wherever possible.
- Taxation should be on wealth before income.
- Public housing at fixed and affordable rents should be a right of all not just the desperately poor.
- All workers should have a right to a job and the workweek reduced with no loss of pay to make that possible.
- Local communes should be supported for control and delivery of as many functions of the centralised state as possible – including housing, education, health care.
- Local communes to support cooperative forms of production of food, solar and wind energy, electric transport, and media.
The realisation that we need economic sovereignty to empower a functioning State that has the resources to protect us from external shocks in a world being defined by external shocks can have powerful consequences politically, culturally and economically.
Unfortunately few on the NZ Left seem to have recognised this.
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TDB Team 2020.
Think my dick went a little hard
No doubt a complete novelty.
Don’t ever speak to me like that again
The reason you hate Hooton’s column is because it puts a cost on your policy choices. Something you don’t have the intellectual horsepower, or honesty, to address.
Oh yes , .. and we were all living in the trees and eating grass being 1984, I suppose you think.
Psssst !… don’t spread it around, but there were multi millionaires in NZ BEFORE 1984….
I’m picking that unintelligible gibberish sounded better in your head before you wasted your time typing it out?
It’s government policy to price people’s suffering and then adjust borrowing to meet the new spending requirements. Is Hootons priorities different?
Yep, Morgan’s interview on MR was gruesome – but what do you expect from him?
I choose to remain ignorant of what Hoskings and Hooton wrote in the NZ Herald. I’m not paying that outfit to read their stuff – on or offline!!
Interesting that John Key was featured, photo included, in two articles in papers in the last few days, being asked his opinion on issues of the day. Just shows that “the reality is…” how desperate National are to find a current spokesperson from within their Parliamentary ranks who can offer intelligent, insightful comment. To get comment from the right, the media has to revert to an aging, has-been (thank god he is!). Sad!
I have life rather soft… I dont own a TV so I never hear what Hosking has to say and Hooton?… I’m like you when you say ” I wont pay that outfit to read their material either online or offline”…
You are wrong Ross Matthews – Contact Energy was totally privatised and is American owned. Martyn is right it is time that the SOE model paying dividends back to the state, was scrapped. It wasn’t working for TVNZ and now it won’t work for the power companies or transport. It would be nice to have a UBI but could we not settle for a targeted one in the meantime? On housing, I think the government should make a mass purchase of housing stock with compulsory acquisition if need be. The cost of housing must come down – drive those property speculators – leeches on society – out of the market.
It won’t be for at least a year, when the effects of covid19 on mortality rates can be compared with that in countries that took different or no measures ; either because they chose not to like Sweden and Brazil or because US sanctions rendered them unable to respond as in Iran and to a large degree Venezuela ( Are we co-operating with US in this abomination?) , that we will know if these measures were justified. Or how much they have cost the economy.
But the balance is not just between the nation’s health and it’s economy. There’s a balance between the health and lives lost to cover 19 and the health and lives that will be lost by the measures put in place too. That will move from cover 19 toward all other health issues increasingly as time goes on.
The whole heart service , from dentistry through GPs ,general hospitals and specialist care that are either closed completely or greatly compromised in case they are needed to deal with this virus.
If at the end of the month’s lockdown the new cases have dwindled to a trickle and no more deaths that can truly be blamed on the virus have occurred and we all go back to normal with only a few lives ruined financially (they won’t be the Gareth Morgans) it will seem to have been a success. But if it takes three months or more the measures will probably have killed more people than they have saved.
D J S
Consider if nothing was done then how many deaths would you expect – as a thinking exercise.
Lots of analysts don’t think that so far it looks like any country will show overall death rates outside normal range for the year. More than some less than others.. In Italy the average age of people dyeing of it is just over 80, and the average co-morbility conditions the victims have (competing with the virus to kill them) is 2.7.
That’s why I think we won’t know for a year what difference it will make to the overall death rate.
D J S
Agreed David.
Some deaths can be attributed to covid19 even when other condition in a patient may be contributive.
So far we have one death. Currently an aged care facility has a cluster of covid19 cases that may, unfortunately add to that one death.
Small numbers as found in NZ can be skewed by a pocket of contagion connected with break down of bubbles, or lack of regular testing of health care staff or inspite of such testing.
Whittling down the odds is a bit of a gamble but a deadly serious one.
We had high concern recently about measles and I did not hear a voice commenting that we should let the measles run its course and let herd immunity build up. That is what happened when I was a toddler and I probably still have immunity to measles but in those times there was a background of herd immunity. Mainly kids caught measles in our neighbourhood
Covid 19 is a very different matter.
No background herd immunity, a large vulnerable aged population and virtually no preparation and a run down Health system.
But at least we have a public health system which places us streets ahead of the USA and others.
Martyn, I know it’s more nuanced but for the sake of brevity; I believe you you should be calling the world’s monetary systems a death cult NOT capitalism.
I mean, it’s the German state finance minister throwing himself in front of a moving train and bankers being found dead.
“Unfortunately few on the NZ Left seem to have recognised this.”
Possibly because the majority of the New Zealand left does at least have some grip on reality?
Yeah the bosses’ are going bats because their system is collapsing.
In fact they are killing it by killing nature.
They are history and they don’t now it yet but they already feel it.
They are behaving like headless chooks.
The Aotearoa Green Deal is a start in the right direction.
But what will drive it?
Not the state with its parliamentary facade that is owned by the bosses.
A workers state, which represents the 80% who are workers and live off their labour, not the 20% who are parasites and live off workers’ labour.
And for that to work in NZ, this laboring class has to join forces with the working masses of all other countries to remove the slacker 20%.
In particular those closest to us in history and trade – Australia, the South Pacific, SE Asia and China.
That way Australasia gets joined to Asia where the world centre of gravity of people and resources resides.
So the virus has done us the favor of exposing the real virus that sucks our blood to keep Zombie capitalism alive.
If you’re not with us you are against us.
In the last election those voting National were more or less happy with the way the country was heading so at 44.5% nearly half of the population would not join a revolution and neither would the NZF or Act voters . Those that I know who voted Labour or Greens did so because they were teachers or nurses who rightly felt underpaid and not appreciated or did not like National but they are not warriors. Any change to the status quo will be slow and will come about as the work force shrinks due to population decline
MSM largely decides the way votes go.
Who owns them? Guess.
I stopped taking any notice of the MSM years ago and wont be back.