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East Jerusalem is not in Israel!

By
Leslie Bravery
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8

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What part of “There is not and never will be a Palestinian state” does Murray McCully not understand?

Every day, Palestinians, living in their own country, are persecuted by soldiers and police from another country – Israel. The Occupying power’s armed enforcers kill, take prisoner, humiliate and restrict the movements of people in the furtherance of a racist ideology that is obsessed with changing the “demographic composition” (see Security Council Resolution 446) not just of East Jerusalem but of the whole of Occupied Palestine. To that end, while the world looks on and does nothing, Israeli forces relentlessly commit crimes against humanity in the territories they dominate. These violations have been identified and condemned in countless UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and millions of news reports.

What the world can see, the news media and many politicians ignore
On 13 October 2015, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees declared that “an entire generation of Palestinians is at risk” and called upon “all political actors” to “act decisively” to “restore hope to Palestinians” that there can be for them “a dignified, secure and stable future.” On 19 October, the Catholic peace movement Pax Christi International issued a statement noting that the Israeli Army and police use “. . . excessive force in a ‘shoot to kill’ policy against Palestinian civilians, resulting in injury and death and provoking counter-violence from the Palestinian community.” Pax Christi also observed that Israeli forces “are inciting and provoking extremists on both sides of the conflict in attempts to escalate violence and justify further military action. Such actions must be challenged.” It recognised in its statement what the mainstream news media and too many political leaders fail to acknowledge – “the deep frustration and oppression of Palestinians who have lived with forty-nine years of illegal occupation.” The Pax Christi statement pleaded with the “international community, including the EU and the United Nations to renew its resolve to address the root causes of the conflict.” The statement went on to note that “international protection for Palestinian civilians has emerged as a key need . . .” and that “the Occupation should be ended in order for peace to be achieved.” On Friday, 16 October, in a speech to the Security Council, the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council, Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, called on the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to submit to the UN Security Council a proposal related to granting international protection for Palestinians in Occupied territories. Churkin declared that Israel was responsible for the on-going tension in East Jerusalem and said that Israel, as an Occupying power, was “obliged to address the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and respect humanitarian principles regarding people in the Occupied territories.”

Day and night under Occupation
Schoolchildren are the most innocent of victims. Growing up under Israeli military Occupation inevitably engraves deep impressions upon their minds. Their earliest memories are of night home invasions and witnessing people being beaten, sometimes even killed. They share in the grief for lost family members and live with the ever-present clouds of stifling Israeli tear gas. Many have fathers who are obliged to set off for work in the middle of the night, simply in order to get through the mindlessly banal checkpoints that Israel forces non-Jews to negotiate in Occupied Palestine. Maya Abu Hayat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop and a mother of three. She says the situation for Palestinians in East Jerusalem has been worsening for years and now the new restrictions on movement inside Jerusalem are even more severe. Maya has twins, just seven years old, and she says that now most of their questions are about death.

Our news media should be helping people to appreciate the despair that Palestinian villagers suffer when, for instance, their precious olive harvest is plundered by Occupation settlers, as happened twice on the same day in different West Bank areas just this month. We should try to imagine the trauma of being frequently forced out of one’s home, along with dozens of neighbouring families as Palestinians are in the Jordan Valley, because a foreign army wants to conduct military exercises. Imagine how frantic the parents must feel, after their home has been subjected to a night home invasion by heavily-armed troops who ordered their children out of their beds and abducted one or more of them. Imagine owning an orchard and seeing foreign settlers or their army, or both together, setting fire to your trees.

Water
A major aquifer under the West Bank is controlled by Israel and from it the Occupying power illegally plunders two-thirds of the precious water. Across the Occupied West Bank, Israel’s illegal settlements have completely free access to water. Settler homes enjoy full swimming pools and well-watered gardens, while Palestinian access to their own water is severely restricted. Israel compounds this crime in two ways: The Zionist state forces Palestinians to pay the Israeli government public water supply company Mekorot for what little water they are allowed and, at the same time, Israel forbids Palestinians to sink wells or even build water storage facilities. Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation are restricted to about 70 litres a day per person – well below the 100 litres per capita daily recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – whereas Israeli daily per capita consumption, at about 300 litres, is about four times as much.

Home demolitions and collective punishments
Israel is the beneficiary of Britain’s contemptuous denial of Palestinian self-determination following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. It was Britain that introduced the British Mandate Regulation 119 of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations and granted itself broad discretionary powers to impose excessive punishments without trial or any other judicial proceedings. Since 1967, Israel has adopted the principles of this same British regulation for use against the Palestinian people to destroy Palestinian homes. Collective punishment perpetrated by Israel includes the destruction of local agriculture, orchards, solar power facilities, wells and irrigation. The United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, among others, have all affirmed repeatedly that Israel’s Occupation is governed by the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in times of war states that no one living under military Occupation “may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.” It adds that “collective penalties” and “reprisals” against the population and their property are prohibited. Israel is fast-tracking the demolition of homes belonging to the families of Palestinians accused of, or involved in, attacks on Israeli Jews. Demolishing a family home is a cruel enough act of collective punishment but at times the Israeli Army, even more sadistically, forces some families to destroy their own homes.

UNRWA concern
On Monday, 13 October, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) condemned the recent murders of Palestinians as well as injuries inflicted by Israeli Occupation forces. Violence was prompted by groups of Jewish settlers forcing their way into the grounds of East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque over the last month. UNRWA expressed its concern over the use of live ammunition by Israeli forces to disperse demonstrators, describing it as “excessive use of force”, which, it said, “may be contrary to international law enforcement standards”. UNRWA observed that, for Palestinians across the whole of Occupied Palestine, “there is a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair resulting from the denial of rights and dignity”.

In Israel, nine human rights organisations, including B’Tselem, the Association for Human Rights in Israel and Amnesty International, have jointly condemned Israel’s “shoot to kill” policy against Palestinian suspects. In their statement the organisations observe that “. . . it seems that too often, instead of acting in a manner consistent with the nature of each incident, police officers and soldiers are quick to shoot to kill.” Leading Israeli politicians and officials seem to support the summary executions of Palestinians; Israel’s police commander for Jerusalem, Moshe Edri, has stated: “Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocents — his judgement is to be killed.” Israel’s public security minister Gilad Erdan asserted that “every terrorist should know that he will not survive the attack he is about to commit.” It goes without saying that such measures do not apply to Jewish settler terrorists.

Desperate to annul Palestine’s diplomatic successes
With the raising of the Palestinian flag at the United Nations (Palestinians living under Occupation can be shot or taken prisoner for displaying that same flag) and other diplomatic achievements, along with the growing success of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Israel is panicking and exploits acts of desperation by young Palestinians to reinforce its carefully-nurtured stereotypes of Palestinians. To keep that pot boiling Israeli soldiers even dress up as Palestinian youngsters and throw stones at uniformed soldiers, to encourage demonstrators to do the same. Recent film of Occupation violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem shows what appear to be armed civilians seizing Palestinian demonstrators and handing them over to the Israeli Army. Israel calls these soldiers mistaravim and they are dressed in order to merge unnoticed among the local Palestinians to carry out missions that include outright murder on behalf of the Israeli Occupation forces.

Israel’s uncompromising contempt for the so-called peace talks
At a ceremony to mark Jerusalem Day on 21 May 2009, at the city’s Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, Binyamin Netanyahu said “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, a city reunified so as never again to be divided.” Also speaking at the ceremony was Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin. Asserting that Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem is not negotiable, Rivlin said: “The world must recognise our sovereignty, as well as the primacy of the Jewish people in the holy sites, as our inalienable right.”

Squandering NZ’s voice at the Security Council
It is a deep shame that what the world can see, New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister cannot, or will not acknowledge. According to an Associated Press report, Murray McCully told a UN Security Council ministerial meeting on Thursday, 22 October, that he will “circulate a draft UN resolution in the coming days that will . . . reaffirm the council’s commitment to a two-state solution and direct talks to achieve peace.” Either Murray McCully is pathetically ill-informed or he is, like John Key, covering for Israel because he surely must know that the Zionist state has unequivocally rejected the two-state solution. On Sunday, 18 October, Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked declared to a conference in Washington DC that, “We are against a Palestinian state. There is not and never will be a Palestinian state.” What part of “There is not and never will be a Palestinian state” does Murray McCully not understand? He could, of course, try to give the impression that this is just one Israeli voice. But the ominous reality is otherwise.

An article by Ben White, a British freelance journalist and human rights activist, reveals just how entrenched is the opposition in Israel to the idea of a two-state solution. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely has declared against it and so has the Minister of Education Naftali Bennett and the Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and the Minister of National Infrastructure Yuval Steinitz and the Minister of Immigration Absorption Ze’ev Elkin and the Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel and the Minister of Science, Technology and Space Ofir Akunis and the Minister of Transportation and Road Safety Yisrael Katz and the Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliet and the Minister of Welfare and Social Services Haim Katz.

Just to make it crystal clear to Murray McCully
Netanyahu was re-elected on the promise that there would never be a Palestinian state so long as he was prime minister. He said so in answer to a direct question. He had, unsurprisingly, also expressed this view earlier in a video interview published on an Israeli news website. A CNN article dated 16 March 2015 confirmed Netanyahu’s position, citing a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report that he regarded a strong government led by his Likud Party as necessary to “beat back international pressure to divide Jerusalem and return Israel to its pre-1967 borders”. The CNN article reveals that Netanyahu is bent upon building more settlements. Speaking of the Har Homa Occupation settlement, he said: “The pressure around this decision back then was enormous. But I insisted – I ordered the construction and it paid off.” Netanyahu boasted that, “Today, Har Homa is a flourishing neighbourhood in which tens of thousands of Israeli civilians are living. He then confirmed what the Security Council has already recognised and condemned, regarding Israel’s intentions: “My friends and I in the Likud will keep Jerusalem united in all its parts, and we will keep fortifying it so that dividing it will not be possible and it will always remain united. We will keep developing our eternal capital.”

Yet Murray McCully, in the face of all this, and while acknowledging that “the events of recent weeks cry out for action”, railed against UN peace-keeping efforts at the UN Security Council ministerial meeting and instead mindlessly tried to sell “a realistic but early time frame” for talks and the possibility of another draft resolution setting out the parameters of a peace deal early next year!

Liberation
The world majority is agreed that the Israeli Occupation is unacceptable and when the truth can be apparent from so many, widely varied perspectives, why is it so difficult for our leaders to stand up for international law and take action? So keen to send troops to the Middle East when it suits their purposes, they should be happy to see United Nations Peace-keepers bring to the Palestinian people, at last, the security they have for so long been denied. That would be the first essential step towards ending Israel’s impunity and making possible the beginnings of a more peaceful and tolerant future.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Why Key chooses to talk masturbation on commercial radio

By
Martyn Bradbury
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41

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The National Party cheerleader, the NZ Herald, is embarrassed by our Prime Minister…

How does John Key get away with these things? To expose himself on radio to personal questions to which he can answer only yes or no is bound to endanger the dignity of his office. Thanks to an appearance on Hauraki’s breakfast programme, we now know our Prime Minister has, among other things, stolen something and peed in a shower.

Though that is more than we want to know, it is less than we might learn.

If he is going to admit to criminal and social offences, it begs a number of questions.

…Key loves commercial radio. It’s a cultural and political wasteland for NZers who have about as much intellectual curiosity as a coma patient. Commercial Radio is a colourblind medium judging a rainbow.

Key can appear on commercial radio and laugh it up with the bloke BBQ mentality that passes as public debate because Key has  depoliticization of the role of Prime Minister.

National can’t win the economic argument for their free market dogma because the reality is all it does is enrich those already wealthy. Rather than explain what his Government will do to actually lift 1 in 5 children out of poverty, Key will tell Maori cannibal jokes, gay red shirt jokes, marry a rock DJ in a mock Gay wedding, camp mincing down run way walks, discuss how often he uses the c word,  dance Gangnam styles on radio, laugh at David Cunliffe for criticising domestic violence, talk about stealing, peeing in the shower and masturbation.

Key’s ability to appeal to the anti-intellectualism of his supporters by dismantling the responsibilities of the Prime Ministership down to a pop culture youtube clip could come unstuck if we had a Jon Stewart type who could highlight this, sadly satire in this country is as dead as investigative journalism and all we have is John Oliver.

When we consider the depoliticization of the role of PM with this Government’s mass surveillance powers and attacks on journalists who challenge them, we have a creeping casual fascism hellbent on focusing on the trivial and stupid while crushing the important.

It’s amazing isn’t it – Key will talk about masturbation, trimming his pubic hair, stealing and urinating in the shower but he won’t talk to us about the TPPA, mass surveillance or Dirty Politics.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

What mainstream haven’t mentioned about Westpac corporate narking on Nicky Hager

By
Martyn Bradbury
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47

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The true scope of Police harassment directed at Nicky Hager should send a deep chill through each and every NZer.

What we are witnessing in real time is a growing Police State with all the casual fascism of a book burning around a BBQ.

The Police have also understood the deep negative egalitarian anti-intellectualism that infects the NZ psyche. The desire to hold the powerful to account is perceived by this culturally cringed rump of NZ as being a smart arsed stirrer who simply  by their ability to string together a coherent question makes them a target for ‘oh-you-think-you’re-smarter-than-me’ styled resentment.

The cops know this and know that their extraordinary harassment of Hager will be ignored by the mainstream media and will be seen as just desserts by rump NZers who still think the biggest issue with Dirty Politics is that Hager used stolen e-mails.

Let’s just recap what has been revealed by TDB with what has been revealed today in the NZ Herald…

Detectives investigating the Dirty Politics hacker Rawshark sought the banking, telephone and travel records of author and journalist Nicky Hager without any search order or other legal power.

Court records show Westpac – the government’s banker for 26 years – handed over “almost 10 months of transactions from Mr Hager’s three accounts” at the request of detectives investigating the hacking of Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater’s email and social media accounts.

Other companies that were asked for Hager’s private details told police to come back with a court order, which would have legally obliged them to surrender the information.

…this is clear evidence of the NZ Police bullying and threatening companies with adverse legal ramifications if they don’t hand over information on a  journalist who had embarrassed the Government – note, not one bloody search order or warrant has been signed, just the NZ Police using threats. This is just scratching the surface, as The Daily Blog revealed in July of this year, this practise of threatening banks means that the banks themselves then use this request as a black mark against the persons credit rating. By the Police threatening Westpac, Westpac responds by putting a black mark against Hager’s credit rating.

Unbelievable.

On top of that, we had Nicky Hager himself tell NZ during last months Table Talk…

Most interesting was the new fact that Nicky Hager stated that the Police had tried to arrest him and had attempted to tap his phone rather than just raid his house for evidence on who hacked Cameron Slater.

Just consider that for a moment. The Police weren’t really looking for evidence as to the identity of RawShark, they were actually trying to arrest Hager and attempted to spy on him after he humiliates the Government. A Journalist targeted by the police for highlighting unethical behaviour by the Government and no other media outlet even pick up on this new revelation.

…you could wait months for Scoop or the NZ Herald to bring this to your attention, or you could just read The Daily Blog. Note, no other mainstream media outlet have picked up on this Police tactic of hurting people’s credit rating or that Hager himself said the Police were attempting to tap his phone and arrest him, not Rawshark.

This abuse of police power to attempt to arrest a journalist who embarrassed the Government should lead every news bulletin in this country, but because our mainstream media have deteriorated into clickbait entertainment banality, the ramifications of this type of abuse of power aimed at journalists holding the powerful to account isn’t explained to voters.

No wonder National are still polling near 50%.

 

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

EXCLUSIVE: Mark Jennings Oaktree shadow and how TV3 are trying to explain their ratings meltdown

By
Martyn Bradbury
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TV3 and the rest of the mainstream media do not want to acknowledge the role of the boycott on TV3 for their ratings decline.

It doesn’t get mentioned because the media networks are terrified that such boycotts could pick up real momentum and impact their crap biased news shows as well, so while the media will admit the social media campaign to support Campbell Live resulted in the highest ratings the show ever attained, they refuse to even mention that same social media power could drag down ratings.

By denying the fact that ethical news consumers have boycotted a network for political interference into real fourth estate journalism, TV3 Management don’t have to have their role and real reasons for killing off Campbell Live scrutinised. Instead it’s all to blame for some other mystical reason.

This need to avoid real investigation into their motives for knifing Campbell Live has risen all the way to Oaktree, the American vulture fund who owns Mediaworks. Recently Oaktree demanded someone from TV3 Management turn up in Europe and explain what the bloody hell is going on with their assets and why these recent changes have melted down ratings. One would have thought that someone from the TV3 Management team who was actually behind the politically motivated move to end a current affairs show that was embarrassing the Government would have been sent to explain to MediaWorks Corporate Overlords the momentual cock up that has occurred.

That didn’t happen. Sources to TDB via the Tip Line say that poor old Mark Jennings, the head of news and current affairs was sent to explain things to Oaktree rather than the Management team who decided to gut Campbell Live. So weak was Mark’s explanation for the ratings meltdown that Oaktree sent a corporate shadow from Britain to follow Jennings around and now as Jennings walks around and does his day to day tasks, this Oaktree shadow follows him listening to everything.

So I’d like to take some time to speak directly to that Oaktree Shadow.

Hey Oaktree Shadow, how are you doing? Did you know we shot Lord Of The Rings here? Have you seen our beautiful landscape? Heard of the All Blacks? That’s all us.

I appreciate you are pretty busy trying to crucify Mark Jennings for Oaktree as you desperately try and understand why your short term investment into a tiny NZ media business has turned belly up, but I think perhaps you need some more context.

The new Management Team at TV3 are close friends to the government, they decided to axe Campbell Live – hosted by the most popular news personalities in NZ – for political reasons, not commercial reasons. They have plotted and used Cameron Slater’s business partner over at the TV ratings blog ‘Throng’ and Rachel Glucina to seed negative stories about Campbell Live to set in motion its downfall (Cameron and Rachel are far right media personalities that make the National Front look pleasant).

Threatening Campbell Live provoked a huge social media campaign that boosted ratings and when it turned out TV3 Management were politically motivated to kill off the show, that social media campaign turned into a boycott and it is that boycott you are seeing in your ratings meltdown.

Blaming Mark Jennings might be convenient, but it isn’t where the decision for change originated. If you want to take your Oaktree masters a couple of heads on plates, it isn’t his you should be aiming for.

 

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

When Monsters Fight: Benjamin Netanyahu Blames a Palestinian Cleric for the Holocaust

By
Chris Trotter
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20

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WRITING ABOUT ISRAEL is never easy. Always there is the shadow of the Shoah. The attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis interposes itself between the Israeli people and their critics. The Holocaust is a crime so vast in scope, so horrendous in execution, that the crimes of the Israeli state seem small and petty by comparison. Whatever Israel does risks being absorbed in, and absolved by, the Jewish people’s unique historical tragedy.

A cynic might even go so far as to suggest that the Shoah is Israel’s most precious possession. Those grainy black and white images, recorded by the liberators of the death camps at the end of World War II, are seared upon humanity’s collective memory. The mechanisation – no, the industrialisation – of mass murder marked a definitive break in the supposedly upward trajectory of civilisation. In Auschwitz and Treblinka humankind was presented with an abysmal mirror, into which most people did not care to look.

That the victims of the Holocaust were Jews contributed an inescapably religious dimension to the horror. God’s chosen people, reviled and persecuted across the centuries, had finally become the playthings of pure evil. Who dared object to the traumatised survivors being allowed to return to their ancient homeland? How could the West, who worshipped a crucified Jew, possibly say “No.” to the State of Israel? Hadn’t the Jews earned it?

The answer, of course, is “No. They had bought, borrowed and (in the end) stolen it from the people who had lived in the land the Roman’s called “Palestine” from the Second Century to the late Nineteenth Century, when Theodor Herzl and his Zionists began buying up Palestinian farms and businesses. The encroachment of these Jewish settlers, and their settlements, gathered pace through the early decades of the Twentieth Century, to the point where the Palestinians and their religious leaders rose in angry revolt. One of those leaders, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was to become an implacable enemy of the Zionist project.

Palestinian protests and uprisings against the unceasing encroachments of Israeli settlers and settlements continues to this very day. In its latest manifestation, the resistance takes the form of what amount to suicidal knife attacks on Israelis as they walk the streets of Old Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s belligerent Prime Minister, has taken steps to quell these attacks – by any means necessary!

Few would have predicted, however, that in his determination to rouse the passions of his people, Netanyahu would have seized upon the single most important – and certainly the most sacred – talisman of the Israeli state: the Shoah.

So intense is the Israeli PM’s hatred of the Palestinians that, in a speech to the World Jewish Congress, he claimed that the responsibility for the mass murder of European Jewry lay not with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi co-conspirators, but with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time”, Netanyahu told the Congress, “he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here’. ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said. ‘Burn them’.”

Historians from all over the world, and many within Israel, responded to Netanyahu’s words with a mixture of fury and disbelief. The Nazi’s genocidal project was commenced long before al-Husseini met with Hitler on 28 November 1941. The infamous Wannsee Conference, held outside Berlin in January 1942, brought together for final approval plans and specifications demanded several months earlier, as the massive logistical implications of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish Question became clear. The Mufti of Jerusalem was little more than a Nazi catspaw in the complex military and diplomatic equation that was the Middle East. For anyone to suggest that he, and, by some curious Zionist variant of the “blood libel”, the Palestinian people, were responsible for the Holocaust would be outrageous. But for the Prime Minister of Israel to make such a statement, in the midst of serious sectarian strife, is beyond outrageous – it is criminal.

It also marks an important, and quite possibly fatal, deterioration in the intellectual and moral condition of Zionism. That a Zionist leader is willing to publicly exonerate Adolf Hitler for the extermination of six million Jews, and place the blame, instead, upon a Palestinian cleric, indicates how abysmal are the depths into which the defenders of Israel have fallen.

The Nineteenth Century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Have we not just seen the abyss swallow up the monster called Netanyahu?

 

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

The antiTPPA National Day of Action Nov 14th – why we need a TPPA that protects taxpayers not tax-dodgers

By
Donna Miles
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It never seizes to amaze me how, even seemingly intelligent people, can fall into the trap of preoccupying themselves with the behavior and habits of the poor without extending the same consideration to the behavior and values of those on the very top.

Ok, we know some people abuse the welfare system but the amount of thieving that goes on at the bottom of the economic ladder is a drop in an occasion compared to the daylight robbery that happens at the top.

Why, instead of attacking the social welfare system, are we not cracking down on the corporate welfare system that socializes big business’ costs (by offering them carbon tax credits for instance) and privatizes their profits?

We know the trickle down economy is a fragment of neoliberal economists’ imagination, so why do we let multinationals get away with blatant tax avoidance?

Many argue that there is little that any one country can do because these highly fluid companies will simply uproot, head to a different country and take the local jobs with them.

This defeatist line of thinking fails in its limited imagination. If, under the TPPA, 12 nations can come together to agree on measures designed to protect the interests of multinationals, why can’t they come together to ensure maximum protection for the rights of people?

John key says, we have no choice but to offer big companies incentives to stay in New Zealand.  Why should companies that are already using our resources to make profits, demand sweeteners from our government? And we talk about the excessive entitlement of the poor?

If there was a global will and cooperation to eradicate poverty and tackle inequality then the TPPA would be all about reigning in the powers of multi-nationals, not enhancing them.

If we had a people’s TPPA, we could confidently tell big businesses to take it or leave it.  After all, if corporate welfare is abolished globally then there will be little reason for big businesses to relocate elsewhere.

Sadly, the reality is that poverty and inequality are the necessary pillars of neoliberalism. Today, 85 people hold as much wealth as the bottom half in the world. Yes, just 85 individuals!

A people’s TPPA will never become reality unless we fight the current economic model and its insatiable appetite for growth.

The main thrust of Russel Norman’s speech was about the value of dissent and the role of agitators in a functioning democracy.

He is absolutely right. If we love New Zealand, we have to do more than just watch the All Blacks play rugby; we have to get off the couch and defend our country against the TPPA’s assault on our democracy and sovereignty.

The anti-TPPA national day of action is on Nov 14th.  Support New Zealand’s democracy and join a march near you.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

GUEST BLOG: City Vision – Refusal to remove misleading electoral signs

By
The Daily Blog
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Following complaints to the Electoral Officer overseeing the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust election the right-wing C&R ticket have refused to remove or modify misleading electoral signage.
“For the third AECT election in a row C&R have made misleading statements regarding the payment of the AECT dividend. A slash on election billboards stating $345 =C&R is contrary to the Local Electoral Act and a breach of the principles under which the AECT election is conducted” said City Vision chair, Robert Gallagher
In August 2015 Trust beneficiaries (people on the power account in the AECT district) received a dividend of $345 from the Trust. The AECT dividend is a direct result of the Trust’s 75.4% shareholding in Vector.
“I’ve written to Earl White, C&R Campaign Chair requesting the removal or modification of the slashes. I am disappointed but not surprised that C&R have responded refusing to take action and are ignoring the electoral officer’s guidance on the matter”.
“It is a serious issue to ignore a request from an electoral officer. It demonstrates the arrogance of the C&R current AECT trustees who are willing to ignore established election principles to maintain control of the Trust.” Says Mr Gallagher
Notes:
The AECT election is conducted under its own Deed of Trust. Under the Deed of Trust the returning officer is responsible for conducting the election and to the extent that the Deed of Trust Rules do not prescribe a particular matter, the returning officer is entitled to determine the procedure accordingly.
The AECT candidate booklet states that “the Local Electoral Act 2001 is adopted for the purposes of this election. No candidate should act in a way which would amount to an offence if the election were being held under that Act”.
S125 of the Local Electoral Act states:
(1) Every person commits the offence of bribery who, directly or indirectly, on thatperson’s own or by another person,-
(a) gives, lends, agrees to give or lend, offers, promises, or promises to obtain any money or valuable consideration to or for any elector, or to or for any person on behalf of any elector, or to or for any other person, in order to induce any elector to vote or refrain from voting.
The Electoral Officer, Mr Dale Ofsoske has advised, following a complaint from City Vision Councillor Cathy Casey, that he considers the  statement on the slash placed on C & R billboards – “$345 = Vote C & R” (refer attached photo) does not give any text to the $345 figure and in particular does not state what that payment is for or when it would be paid. It could be misinterpreted, especially by electors who are unfamiliar with the dividend issue. Mr Ofsoske has confirmed he has written to C&R in relation to the slash statement.
City Vision is supporting a ticket of 5 candidates:  Anne-Marie Coury, Jeanette Elley, Simon Mitchell, Kirk Serpes and Judith Tizard
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Hope: The Four-way Division of Income

By
Keith Rankin
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My most recent chart (New Zealand Income Shares 2013/14, 21 October) in my Chart for this Weekseries on Evening Report shows the four-way division of income in New Zealand for the year ended March 2014. The data is from the National Accounts of New Zealand has been straightened out by revealing the full extent of the public shares.

The first cut of income shares should be understood to be the division between private and public. Within each of those shares there is a ‘second cut’. In the case of private income, the cut is between labour and capital. In the case of public income, the cut is between the people (‘demos’) and the government (‘polis’).

In the national accounts, as they are officially presented, the majority of the public share is obscured, under the name ‘secondary income’. Secondary government income is essentially income tax, including company tax. In the official presentation of the national accounts, a tiny government ‘primary share’ is acknowledged – essentially GST, excise taxes and customs duties. Otherwise, the impression given is that income distribution is essentially a private affair, despite the general acceptance that public resources and cultures play the critical role in determining the difference between rich economies and poor economies.

If we combine ‘secondary’ government income with primary government income, we see the statistical emergence of a genuine public income sector. In the middle part of my chart, income is split almost exactly in thirds, between the public, labour and capital. Green (public), red (labour) and blue (capital).

A careful analysis shows that this boundary between public and private is quite arbitrary. Tax breaks in particular are presented as private income when in reality they represent allocations of income subject to government caprice.

So the right-hand part of the chart (labelled “rethink”) presents a principled division between public and private income, based on existing reality. This is not a wish-list; it’s recent (2013-14) reality subject to a little re-illumination. The private shares are calculated by deducting a 33 percent tax from the private shares on the left-side of the chart. (The core income tax rate in New Zealand is 33 percent, and has been since 1988. 33 percent if anything understates the contribution of public domain assets to New Zealand’s wealth.)

The ‘rethink’ column of the chart shows private income at just over $134 billion dollars, 58 percent of total income generated in New Zealand in that year. Private income is almost exactly equally split between labour and capital.

The remaining 42 percent of income is now split (green and orange) between government spending (‘polis’, green) and payments returned to the people on an essentially universal basis (‘demos’, orange), as “public equity benefits”.

(The principal mechanism through which these payments are made today is through income tax concessions. The secondary mechanisms are through a social security system that still retains its founding ‘cradle-to-grave’ universal ethos, and through Inland Revenue administered “tax credits” paid to caregivers of children.)

Part of the public share remains ambiguous in the ‘rethink’ column; this is ‘transfer payments’ which are cash payments paid through political discretion rather than as a right of ‘economic residence’. It’s not clear whether they should be classed as polis or demos. While in the chart I have opted for polis (public income essentially retained by government and given out through political criteria), payments paid universally on the basis of age only come especially close to being people payments rather than government outlays.

The power of this chart lies in what it means for the future. Through an open acceptance that there are essentially four grand income divisions of the ‘economic cake’, we can think about which of those divisions could get larger and which will get smaller in a progressive vision of the future.

Right-wing libertarians fear the growth of ‘the state’ which to them is ‘big government’. Left-wing libertarians also fear the growth of ‘the state’, defined more broadly but still containing the spectre of big government controlling and surveilling people’s lives, diminishing personal freedom.

In the conventionally-understood three-way division of income with its emphasis on private over public property rights, the labour share can only be maintained under conditions of rapid economic growth. Under other more sustainable conditions, the labour share necessarily falls as labour loses its negotiating power. The problem is, if the ‘state share’ is to be constrained, that simply means a rising private capital share. Thus the dystopic trichotomy is unsustainable growth versus big brother government versus the plutocracy of capital. None of those features are appealing.

However, once we introduce (reveal) the fourth income share (‘demos’, the people; the non-state component of the public division of income), then everything changes. We can become optimistic again for the future of the planet and its people.

If the fall of the labour share is inevitable – as I think most of us recognise that it is, even if we sometimes pretend otherwise – then the falling labour share can be offset by the rise of the ‘people share’ (demos). The capital and government shares can remain much as they are.

That’s my essential vision of political economy; the gradual emergence of the non-state publicly-derived share of aggregate income. The vision is not anti-anything. It is not anti-capital, as much sentiment on the political left is. And it’s not anti-government, as much sentiment on the political right is.

In my chart, the people’s share is modest, 14 percent of national income (enough to pay three-and-a-half million adults a public equity dividend of $175 per week).

Arguably it should be higher than 14 percent. For the present, it doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that this share – as a growing share – is humanity’s hope for the future. I can see no reason why anybody of any political persuasion should feel threatened by the emergence of a people’s income share within the wider rubric of a public share that needs to grow as the labour share declines.

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TheDailyBlog.nz Top 5 News Headlines Saturday 24th October 2015

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5: 

Top U.N. Official Links Israel-Palestine Unrest to Ending Occupation

Meanwhile at the United Nations, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said the current unrest would not be happening if Palestinians had their freedom.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson: “This crisis would not have erupted, I suggest, if the Palestinian people had a perspective of hope towards a viable Palestinian state, if they had an economy that provides jobs and opportunities, if they had more control over their security and the legal and administrative processes that define their daily existence—in short, if the Palestinians did not still live under a stifling and humiliating occupation that has lasted almost half a century.”

Democracy Now 

4: 

Govt accused of community housing flip-flops

In a speech to the Community Housing Aotearoa Conference in Wellington today, Mr English said the government wanted to work with the social housing sector to fill the gap.

However, community housing groups said government policy made it very difficult

for them to remain financially solvent let alone meet the needs of vulnerable clients.

Nelson Tasman Housing Trust director Keith Preston said organisations like his spent too much time battling red tape because the government kept changing the rules.

“To-ing and fro-ing of policy and this ‘start off with a good idea and then nibbling away at the edges of it until the policy becomes unworkable’ and it’s happened time and time and time again, particularly in relation to funding.

“There’s no continuity at all – for groups like ours, it’s constantly stop-start.”

Radio NZ

3: 

Hurricane Patricia: Mexico braces for ‘strongest ever’ storm in east Pacific

Hurricane Patricia strengthened into a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm as it churned toward Mexico’s Pacific coast, having grown at an “incredible rate”in the past 12 hours, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday.

“This is really, really, really strong. It’s comparable with Typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippines with such devastating effect a couple of years ago.”

The Guardian

2: 

TTIP: EU negotiators appear to break environmental pledge in leaked draft

The EU appears to have broken a promise to reinforce environmental protections in a leaked draft negotiating text submitted in the latest round of TTIP talks in Miami..

In January, the bloc promised to safeguard green laws, defend international standards and protect the EU’s right to set high levels of environmental protection, in a haggle with the US over terms for a free trade deal.

But a confidential text seen by the Guardian and filed in the sustainable development chapter of negotiations earlier this week contains only vaguely phrased and non-binding commitments to environmental safeguards.

No obligations to ratify international environmental conventions are proposed, and ways of enforcing goals on biodiversity, chemicals and the illegal wildlife trade are similarly absent.

 The Guardian 

1: 

Lockheed Martin, Boeing Rally Around Saudi Arabia, Wave Off Humanitarian Concerns

Representatives from two major defense contractors whose advanced weaponry is being used in the Saudi Arabia-led bombing campaign that has killed scores of civilians in Yemen were quick to defend the human rights record of the Persian Gulf kingdom in a panel discussion held last week in Washington, D.C.

Ronald L. Perrilloux Jr., an executive with Lockheed Martin, complained of an atmosphere of “hostile media reports” shaping the views of Congress, most of which, he said, are “patently false.”

“Another significant irritant,” Perrilloux said, “is the application of human rights laws” toward U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Perrilloux argued that these countries, despite being “better partners to us than some of our NATO allies,” were being unfairly judged compared to Chinese human rights abuses.

Democrats on Capitol Hill recently blocked arms transfers to Saudi Arabia over concerns regarding the rising civilian death toll caused by the campaign.

The Intercept 

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The Daily Blog Open Mic Saturday 24th October 2015

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openmike

 

Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

 

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Union calls for government investigation into dodgy labour hire practices

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The Daily Blog
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Union calls for government investigation into dodgy labour hire practices

 

Calls are growing for Employment Relations Minister Michael Woodhouse to urgently audit labour hire companies as reports emerge of exploitation and non-compliance.  

 

“Labour hire is common practice in the logistics industry,” says FIRST Union Transport and Logistics Secretary Karl Andersen.

 

“Through our Logistics Workers’ Network we’re receiving alarming reports of employment law breaches.”

 

“Workers have come to us with evidence that some labour hire companies are not paying public holiday rates or sick leave.”

 

“We’ll be filing a claim against a labour hire company soon and we’re calling on the government to step up and conduct an industry-wide audit,” says Andersen.

 

“Labour hire workers are entirely dependent on third party employers for hours, meaning non-unionised workers are often reluctant to come forward. FIRST Union has evidence to believe that exploitation and non-compliance is systemic.”

 

“The government can’t ignore this problem any longer.”

 

 

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TheDailyBlog.nz Top 5 News Headlines Friday 23rd October 2015

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The Daily Blog
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5: 

A new chapter in the New Zealand story

When Simon Bridges announced the areas of Aotearoa that he wants to open up for oil and gas exploration in 2016 (the “Block Offers”), he probably wasn’t expecting this.

In just six weeks since the announcement 25 communities around the country have mobilised and publicly demanded that their local councils say NO to deep sea oil and Block the Offer.

Christchurch City Council was the first to listen to their constituents and have called the Government’s deep sea drilling plans “sheer lunacy”.  Kaikoura District Council followed suit soon after.

Over the next week many other councils will be deciding where they stand.  Auckland Council will decide at a public meeting on November 29th and we will all get see what they’re made of.

In recent history decisions like the one Christchurch and Kaikoura just made caused huge ripples throughout our country and changed the course of history.

Thirty three years ago Wellington City became the first council to go against the Government of the time and declare itself a nuclear-weapon-free zone. This was a brave move and it had an effect far beyond Wellington City.   “Wellington became a benchmark for others… and by the end of 1984, 40 local authorities had nuclear-free policies.”  Central Government then finally stepped up to the plate and at the end of 1984 had banned nuclear armed or powered ships from entering New Zealand’s territorial waters.  This legislation was broadened and strengthened over the next few years and it still remains today.

 GREENPEACE NZ

 

4: 

LAWSUIT CHALLENGES A MISSISSIPPI DEBTORS PRISON

LOW-INCOME RESIDENTS of Jackson, Mississippi, are being coerced into working on a penal farm in a “modern-day debtors prison” for being unable to pay municipal fees and fines for misdemeanors, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court last week.

The suit alleges that the City of Jackson, in Hinds County, employs a “pay or stay” system in which impoverished plaintiffs who are unable to pay court-ordered fines must work off their debts at the county’s penal farm in nearby Raymond at a rate of $58 per day. Those unable or unwilling to work can sit out their debts in jail at a rate of $25 per day.

Seven Hinds County residents are listed as plaintiffs in the complaint, all impoverished black men. Many of them also have physical disabilities.

Jerome Bell, 58 years old and disabled following a series of strokes, owed more than $4,000 in fines and other fees related to traffic violations when he was arrested in July. In court, Judge Gerald Mumford ordered Bell to pay the fines or sit in jail until the debt was paid off. Bell, who lives off a monthly Social Security disability check and food stamps, could not afford to pay and was consequently jailed. The lawsuit claims Bell’s public defender made no effort to assess the accuracy of the court’s charges, nor did he ask the court to consider Bell’s financial difficulties.

According to court documents, Bell was housed at the Raymond Jail for more than 35 days. For 20 days he “slept on the concrete floor of a holding cell in the booking unit of the jail with no mattress or cushion of any sort.” According to his attorney, Jacob Howard, who works with the University of Mississippi’s MacArthur Justice Center, Bell suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and weakness on the left side of his body as a result of multiple strokes.

Despite his physical impediments, Howard told me, Bell would have preferred to be jailed on the penal farm because the living conditions there are said to be better than those at the overcrowded Raymond Jail. Unfortunately for Bell, the county kept him in the jail because his daily insulin shot was unavailable at the penal farm, which sits less than 1 mile from the jail. “I have no idea why they’re incapable of providing daily insulin,” Howard said.

Those incarcerated at the farm pay off their debts by cleaning up horse and chicken dung and collecting eggs, among other tasks.

The Intercept

3: 

Russel Norman gives final speech to Parliament

Former Green Party co-leader Russel Norman has used his final speech in Parliament to lament what he says is a loss of democracy in New Zealand.

Radio NZ

2: 

Outrage over Holocaust comments intensifies as Netanyahu meets Kerry

Binyamin Netanyahu has met with the US secretary of state, John Kerry, in Berlin amid a continuing storm of criticism over remarks by the Israeli prime minister claiming that the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem had suggested the genocide of the Jews to Adolf Hitler.

Although Netanyahu tried to row back on his remarks that Hitler had been persuaded to initiate the Holocaust by the second world war Palestinian leader – made in a speech on Tuesday to the World Zionist Congress – historians and media commentators continued to weigh in accusing him of everything from fabrication to helping the cause of Holocaust deniers.

The Guardian 

1: 

Last Month was the Hottest September Ever Recorded Worldwide

Last month was the hottest September worldwide, and 2015 is now virtually guaranteed to be the hottest year in recorded history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the first nine months of this year have been the hottest such period ever recorded. Driven by warmer temperatures, the strongest El Niño on record is fueling extreme weather, from typhoons in the Philippines to historic summer rains and a looming winter drought in Hawaii. This all comes as negotiators prepare for the U.N. climate summit in Paris November 30.

Democracy Now!

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Malcolm Evans – Israeli security

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LABOUR DAY SPECIAL: Why celebrate Labour Day?

By
Mike Treen
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Labour Day in New Zealand is meant to celebrate the fight for an 8-hour working day.

That struggle has roots going back to when the first ships arrived in New Zealand with people wanting to begin a new life in the colony.

By that time the industrial revolution was in full swing and the horrors of unregulated working days was being reflected in stunted growth and early death. Child labour was common and the working day was usually 10-16 hours a day for a six-day working week.

Early socialist thinkers like Robert Owen in the UK had popularised the idea of 8-hours work, 8-hours rest and 8-hours play as a basic right in the early 1800s. Karl Marx saw it as of vital importance to the workers’ health, saying in Capital: “By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production…not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself.”

One early emigrant on the Ship Duke of Roxburgh in 1839 was a carpenter and joiner by the name of Samuel Duncan Parnell. He had previously worked in a large London joinery establishment with co-workers he described as “a lot of the most red-hot radicals”. At the time in London, 12 or 14-hour days were standard. Reducing working hours was an issue and Parnell refused to join a union established at the time because it wouldn’t make the issue a priority.

The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand Te Ara explains what happened next on Parnell’s voyage to New Zealand:

Among Parnell’s fellow passengers was a shipping agent, George Hunter, who, soon after their arrival, asked Parnell to erect a store for him. ‘I will do my best,’ replied Parnell, ‘but I must make this condition, Mr. Hunter, that on the job the hours shall only be eight for the day.’ Hunter demurred, this was preposterous; but Parnell insisted. ‘There are,’ he argued, ‘twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start to-morrow morning at eight o’clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all.’ ‘You know Mr. Parnell,’ Hunter persisted, ‘that in London the bell rang at six o’clock, and if a man was not there ready to turn to he lost a quarter of a day.’ ‘We’re not in London’, replied Parnell. He turned to go but the agent called him back. There were very few tradesmen in the young settlement and Hunter was forced to agree to Parnell’s terms. And so, Parnell wrote later, ‘the first strike for eight hours a-day the world has ever seen, was settled on the spot.’

Other employers tried to impose the traditional long hours, but Parnell met incoming ships, talked to the workmen and enlisted their support. A workers’ meeting in October 1840, held outside German Brown’s (later Barrett’s) Hotel on Lambton Quay, is said to have resolved, on the motion of William Taylor, seconded by Edwin Ticehurst, to work eight hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., anyone offending to be ducked into the harbour. The eight hour working day thus became established in the Wellington settlement. ‘I arrived here in June, 1841,’ a settler told the Evening Post in 1885, ‘found employment on my landing, and also to my surprise was informed that eight hours was a day’s work, and it has been ever since.’ The last resistance was broken, according to Parnell, when labourers who were building the road along the harbour to the Hutt Valley in 1841 downed tools because they were ordered to work longer hours. They did not resume work until the eight hour day was conceded.

However, there were no unions or laws that could enforce the practice for most workers. Whilst it remained a condition in most trades where labour shortages often prevailed and the building industry it wasn’t able to be extended to other workers in the new colony.

Within a few decades however unions began to be formed and agitation grew immediately for the establishment of a legal workday of eight hours. They became part of an international movement to limit the working day.

Women and children got a ten-hour day in England in 1847. French workers won a 12-hour day following a revolution in February 1848.

The International Workingmen’s Association took up the demand for an eight-hour day at its convention in Geneva in August 1866, declaring “The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive, and The Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working day.”

Te Ara picks up the story:

Agitation for the eight-hour day spread throughout the industrialised world in the 1880s. On 3 May 1886 a workers’ eight-hour strike meeting in Chicago was fired on by police. The following day, at an indignation protest in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown, killing and wounding a number of policemen. Although the bomb thrower was never identified, eight anarchist labour activists were arrested, charged and convicted of conspiracy to murder. Four were executed, while one committed suicide in jail.

At an 1889 international labour congress in Paris, 1 May was adopted as a date to both demonstrate for an eight-hour working day and to commemorate the ‘Haymarket martyrs’. Since 1890 the celebration of May Day as the workers’ day has been adopted in a large number of countries. In New Zealand, however, Labour Day is held on the fourth Monday in October.

New Zealand’s October Labour Day also has its origins in the 1880s eight-hour movement. In 1890 the Maritime Council, consisting of the powerful transport and mining unions, called for a ‘labour demonstration day’. The day was to celebrate workers’ trades and to promote the eight-hour day. The date chosen, 28 October 1890, was the first anniversary of the Maritime Council’s foundation. The council itself did not survive the year, being destroyed in the collapse of the 1890 maritime strike. Despite this set-back, the Labour Day demonstrations were a huge success in many parts of the country. Large processions were held in Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington, with the 80-year-old Samuel Parnell leading the Wellington parade.

In the 1890s Labour Day was not an official holiday, although government offices were closed on the day. Richard Seddon’s Liberal government passed a law in 1899 declaring the second Wednesday in October as the Labour Day public holiday. In 1910 this was ‘Mondayised’, with the Labour Day holiday falling on the fourth Monday in October. While a Labour Day holiday had been gained, the union struggle to extend the eight-hour day to all workers continued.

Today, these early struggles are more relevant than ever. In New Zealand there is no legal minimum anymore. “Flexibility” became the watchword for employers in the 1980s and many of the measures that protected workers from being forced to work excessive hours were removed.

The Minimum Wage Act references a 40-hour 5-day week but we no longer have time and a half penal rates for work in excess of 8 hours in law like they still do in the US. Many industries like security operate on a 12-hour day, 6-day week much like we had in the 19th century.

Other workers subsist on zero-hour contracts and remain working far fewer hours than they want and need. Over-work for some and under-work for others remains a feature of capitalist freedom.

The labour movement should take Labour Day back as a day for fighting to regain legal regulation of the work day. Penal rates should be restored for overtime and weekend work in law. Zero-hour contracts should be outlawed. Everyone deserves regular secure rosters and shifts. No employer should be hiring new staff without offering hours available to existing staff. Full-time work should be the preferred option.

A fighting labour movement mobilising workers in their tens of thousands for fundamental changes to the existing order is where Labour Day and May Day came from. If we can regain the fighting spirit we may be able to reclaim the day as well. We would then have something to truly celebrate.

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The Daily Blog Open Mic Friday 23rd October 2015

By
The Daily Blog
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1

openmike

 

Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

 

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