From asset management giants like BlackRock and Vanguard to NZ’s privatised power companies, critics argue shareholder profit is driving inequality, energy hardship and economic risk.
I am an enormous fan of Professor Wayne Hope, his book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures is a…
While we don’t use the c-word ‘capitalism’ much these days, Winston Peters created a bit of a stir by mentioning it in his coalition announcement speech. And former Green MP Catherine Delahunty, on Backbenchers (television), said that we must address it. These days we sometimes prefer the putative synonym ‘globalisation’ when we want to make an ideological point about the capitalism that many ‘progressives’ see as driving us to economic, social and ecological ruin.
It was sad reading Stephen Hickson’s defence of capitalism in the Press (25 October 2017). Sad because capitalism has delivered so much outright misery to so much of humanity over the last 300 years that it’s hard to believe anyone could be so blinkered.
A Labour led Coalition with the Greens and NZF is a better option to yet another NACT regime, but only because it has promised to roll back marginally some of NACTs reactionary policies. If it succeeds in forming a stable government and delivering on some of these promises, this will generate even more hysteria on the right.
Only when inequality, deregulation, austerity and privatisation are reversed, will justice be done for the Grenfell dead.
Their deaths are a tragedy but it is a tragedy that was written by ideologues and bureaucrats more interested in finding ways to shrug off their obligations than protect the poor.
In the wake of the collapsed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), the New Zealand government has desperately chased new trade liberalisation deals, despite calls for a re-think of trade policy and the development of fair and sustainable agreements.