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Key threatens trade with China after new Snowden spying revelations

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The drip, drip, drip of corrosive information detailing the scope and scale of mass surveillance by the GCSB for the NSA continues and now we have clear evidence that the GCSB have been breaching international law by spying on China’s consulate…

The documents highlight a two-faced New Zealand government policy towards China and raise questions about whether the GCSB has violated international treaties that prohibit the interception of diplomatic communications.

Publicly, the government has declared a good relationship with China is crucial to New Zealand’s economic future. Key has talked about expanding links to grow trade and explore other opportunities with the North Asian economic powerhouse. Since the Free Trade Agreement was signed in Beijing in 2008 – after 15 rounds of talks over three years – two-way trade is worth $20 billion a year and rising.

But it is fragile. Scares such as the Fonterra botulism milk powder recall risk the relationship, and Australia has recently signed an FTA with China, prompting concern that could affect our existing deal.

At a Beijing meeting with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in March last year, Key said: “This relationship has never been stronger.”

Xi Jinping visited New Zealand later that year, stating the China-New Zealand relationship was based on friendly co-operation and mutual respect, and “set a fine example for the pursuit of successful state-to-state relations”.

Key replied that he looked forward to “seeing how we can take our relationship to an even greater height”. The relationship was not “purely trading”, he said. “It is so much broader and much deeper than that.”

But, as minister in charge of the GCSB, Key was also overseeing the plot to spy on China, which included the top-secret planned operation against the Chinese consulate in Auckland.

…on the one hand we are selling all our milk powder to China  while lazy immigration from there continues to prop up Auckland’s property bubble and on the other hand we are spying on China for America.

The price of our role in the 5 Eyes Club could be far higher if China decides to send our economy into a death spiral by cutting milk powder imports and open up more Government zero interest loans for their citizens to buy more  residential land in Auckland.

 

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Why did MediaWorks strangle Campbell Live advertisers?

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So killing off Campbell Live is a commercial decision that has nothing to do with the CEO’s personal friendship with John Key.

Hmmm.

So if that’s true, why were MediaWorks suddenly shortening Advertisers contracts before they mentioned these changes to the show itself?

Campbell’s sponsor cut months ago
MediaWorks management cut a key Campbell Live sponsorship deal, smoothing the path for the show’s axing, months before the company told staff it was conducting a formal review of the flagship current affairs programme.

If the issue is money, why start damaging that revenue stream? MediaWorks have dumped promoting Campbell Live, shortened advertisers contracts and pushed through a prejudged ‘review’. What MediaWorks didn’t count on was the incredible surge of support for Campbell Live that has led to a whopping 40% jump in ratings as supporters have scrambled via social media to save Campbell Live.

This decision to set Campbell Live up to fail by MediaWorks is partly driven by naked greed masquerading as fourth estate obligations but mostly it seems to be a political gag reflex to end one of the only critical broadcasters of the Government.

Now MediaWorks are a private foreign owned media company, and are free to do as they wish, but MediaWorks have been able to gain a dominant position in our market because of our dangerously lax media regulations. Such weak regulation demands fourth estate obligations on MediaWorks because they’ve been given a pretty sweet wicket by our MPs, and that sweet wicket means MediaWorks have a responsibility to NZ, not the other way around.

The interests being served by killing off Campbell Live are political and corporate, they are not in the interests of the people.

Join the social media group. 

If we allow one of the last bastions of critical media on TV to die, we will be a poorer culture for it.

 

 

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RNZ: the final broadcast 2/3

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GUEST BLOG: Tim Leadbeater – The Absurdity and Obscenity of Gallipoli

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As we approach the Gallipoli centenary, I have set myself the task of re – reading some of the best examples of New Zealand writing about the disastrous invasion. There are three  books, Ormond E Burton’s ‘The Silent Division’, Robin Hyde’s ‘Passport to Hell’ and Alexander Aitken’s ‘Gallipoli to the Somme’, all based upon first hand experiences of New Zealanders who fought in the bloody trenches of Gallipoli. I’ll start with the horror and some images of the ‘fallen’. Here is Private J. D. Stark (8/2142, Fifth Reinforcements, Otago Infantry Battalion) describing the bodies of the dead:

But the dead who waited in No Man’s Land didn’t look like dead, as the men who came to them now had thought of death. From a distance of a few yards, the bodies, lying in queer huddled attitudes, appeared to have something monstrously amiss with them. Then the burying-party, white faced, realised that twenty four hours of the Gallipoli sun had caused each boy to swell enormously – until the great threatening carcases were three times the size of a man, and their skins had the bursting blackness of grapes. It was impossible to recognise features or expression in that hideously puffed and contorted blackness.

This powerful and disturbing image, although surely important, is actually not the dominant narrative theme of these memoirs. Although each is distinctive and different, all three agree on one central feature of the Gallipoli experience: the awful monotony, boredom and sense of meaninglessness which dominated their cramped existence inside the trenches. Aitken for example waxes lyrical about Troy, Homer and Milton when he is recounting his Lemnos memories (just before Gallipoli), but this sense of passion and meaning is completely absent from his actual Gallipoli narrative:

I set down these particulars once and for all, not to be referred to again, dull as they must seem to anyone except a New Zealand infantryman who had manned those terraces. But the greater part of modern war, when of the static type, consists precisely of such monotony, such discomfort, such casual death. And so let it be stripped of glamour and seen for what it is. (Aitken 1963)

Burton’s description of Gallipoli is mostly about the mundane and uncomfortable details: the terrible food, the lice and the unsanitary conditions:

Scorching heat, swarms of venomous flies, hosts of never-resting lice, thirst, the pervading stench of the unburied dead, and then a new experience – the frightful monotony of war. A dangerous life is not necessarily an exciting one. A man is not less bored at living in a clay ditch six feet wide and eight feet deep for week on end without being able to move more than fifty yards to the right or left, because at some unknown moment a shell may blow him to smithereens. In war danger is part of the very atmosphere. Beyond a certain point it could not be guarded against. Snipers were always busy – shrapnel burst everywhere. These dangers could not be avoided. They were exceedingly annoying – sometimes even terrifying – but as a general rule not exciting. After the fierce rush of the Landing battles, a daily routine was established. Soon nothing was new, nothing was interesting, nothing was profitable. The bully beef was always salt and stringy; the biscuits were like armour plate bruising, rasping and scraping along the tender gums, smashing gold crowns and splintering plates. Nothing mattered. One thing was just as bad as another and nothing could be worse than some of the things that had gone before. This strain and weariness reacted upon the mental tone. The bad food, the tropical heat, the flies, the smell, wore down the physical condition. Then came the spectre of disease. In June scores of men were going down with diarrhoea, dysentery and enteric; in July they were being evacuated in hundreds.

There are of course other narratives to be found: the military story which revolves around questions of strategy and seeks to explain why Gallipoli was such a disaster for the Allied forces. Burton’s famous quote ‘somewhere between the landing at Anzac and the end of the battle of the Somme New Zealand very definitely became a nation’ provides the starting point for the famous and heavily promoted narrative of national identity. These sorts of narratives strike me as somewhat desperate attempts to provide a higher meaning or purpose for an event which lacks any redeeming features. The tediousness, horror and death of Gallipoli is what stands out as the most solid and truthful aspect of these first hand accounts.

The fact that the Allies were defeated at Gallipoli can be looked at in different ways. From the Turkish perspective the victory served as a powerful source of impetus for Ataturk and Turkish nationalism. There were surely other historical aspects to this process, but Gallipoli is a part of that story. The 1915 victory was a precursor to the eventual establishment of an independent Turkey in 1923. This victorious nationalism is personified by Kemal Ataturk. If you travel through Turkey you will see statues and photos of him everywhere, often posing on top of a rearing horse. It’s a powerful, masculine and militaristic image.

This victorious story of Turkish nationalism which took place between 1915 and 1923 contains a darker side: the Armenian genocide. Estimates differ, but most historians agree on a figure of around 1.5 million deaths. Thousands of other Christian minorites were also killed. Nationalism may have a sense of pride and honour and duty, but it also tends to kill the people it excludes.

From the Allied perspective Gallipoli was merely a battle in a much larger war. The battle may have been lost but the war was won. British and French imperialism triumphed over the Ottoman Empire. Maps were redrawn, promises were made and broken, new countries were formed out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. There’s a very convincing line which can be drawn from the outcomes of 1918 to the terrible conflicts we see raging across the Middle East region today. The interference of Britain and France in the region created the seeds of discontent which are still playing out in the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

This is the truth about Gallipoli: the outcomes are all negative. Looked at narrowly, it was a cynical and callous act of power politics which claimed the lives of thousands of men fighting each other in horrible conditions on a tiny strip of coastline. Looked at from a broader perspective Gallipoli was part of a nationalistic project which in its turn claimed the lives of 1.5 million Armenians. As an aspect of British and French imperialism, Gallipoli is also a part of a terrible legacy of Western intervention in the Middle East.

With these facts in mind it is hard to resist the conclusion that the nature and character of the Anzac commemoration in 2015 is both absurd and obscene. Absurd, because in its relentless and narrow focus upon the moral qualities of the dead soldiers, and a sentimental ideology of “remembrance”, it completely ignores the fact that absolutely nothing good resulted from all of those deaths. Obscene because of the silence it fosters about parallel events which have great relevance and very real connection with Gallipoli seen from a broader historical perspective. Isolating Gallipoli from the Armenian genocide, from the conflicts in Syria and Iraq is an act of historical bad faith. The fact that the rituals of Anzac are conducted with a solemn sense of moral duty makes them even more despicable.

 

 

Tim Leadbeater is a peace activist providing alternative reflections on ANZAC Day.

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Banksy

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How the Greens select their co-leader

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The Daily Blog Open Mic Sunday 19th April 2015

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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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The Nation review – has MediaWorks damaged political journalism worse than Dirty Politics has & what future for Public Broadcasting?

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The Nation was on this morning, but given the mindset of news by MediaWorks Chairman Rod McGeoch, one wonders why bothering to watch it ever again…

“We put news on, but only because it rates. And we sell advertising around news. This is what this is all about.” 

So if that’s MediaWorks attitude towards news, I take it that attitude extends to all their political programming shows, which would help explain the near silence by The Nation on the Campbell Live issue. I tweeted the Nation asking why they were silent, their response was telling…

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…there are more important stories than political and corporate interference in  a current affairs show? Really? Making a joke about Save Campbell Live in their 60 seconds satire piece isn’t discussing the issue, it’s sidelining it. At least we now know why The Nation always pull their punches and sides with the right.

The reality is that MediaWorks position on news is more damaging than the revelations that most of the mainstream media worked hand in glove with the dirty politics smear team of Cameron Slater & Co. If MediaWorks see their role purely as profit driven over any democratic obligations to the fourth estate then the entire charade is made redundant.

Many media are still struggling to gain back any respectability after they were outed as working with Slater, knowing that MediaWorks  is simply pimping for the news market doesn’t help.

What does Public Broadcasting need? It needs vision. It needs a change of Government that aim to increase public interest broadcasting. It needs harder regulation and more taxpayer funded support of the remaining public broadcasting assets we do have. We need a special levy on Sky TV, we need the existing public broadcasters to embrace new media and we need TVNZ7 and Radio NZ 2.

If Labour are serious about public broadcasting they need to give it to an MP with real mana, like David Cunliffe.

In terms of todays Nation programme, it was as dull as death. Laila on the panel was the only highlight. It’s incredible that the Nation still managed to avoid discussing the threats to Campbell Live again for a second week running, but then again when their bosses attitude is “We put news on, but only because it rates. And we sell advertising around news. This is what this is all about,”  are we surprised?

If you care about NZ, you watch Campbell Live. If you care about nothing, you watch Seven Sharp. It’s as simple as that.

 

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So this ANZAC Day we are fighting to spy for torturers and hiding the manner in which NZ soldiers die?

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While we stand at attention and bow our head solemnly to do our pious bit for ANZAC Day, what exactly are we fighting for this year?

Apart from siding with butchers and dictators who have helped create the new generation of Muslim fanaticism, it appears we are fighting to spy for torturers and the ability to hide how NZ soldiers die in battle.

Our need to worship the dead for some sense of identity has blinded us to the mistakes that drive war and that’s why we are silent on the outrageous hypocrisy of entering a new war to suck up to America.

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Housing economy played like a monopoly game but too important to be left to chance

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The housing crisis is the issue of the moment but is at risk of being appropriated by a multitude of interests, many of them vested, each who frame the debate – and the solutions, in their own ways.

There are at least two important elements – a housing affordability problem, and a housing availability problem. It’s now almost an unreachable ‘kiwi dream’ to own your own home, especially in Auckland, but these days many kiwis also struggle to find one to live in. Property prices are out of control, property wealth is accumulating in the hands of the few, there’s a housing shortage, overcrowding, homelessness.

Developers and land interests would have us believe both housing affordability and availability would be solved by freeing up land supply. But a recent report, ‘Long Term Vacant Residentially Owned Land in Auckland’, commissioned by the Auckland Council, found about 8000 vacant, residentially zoned sites already available for development within Auckland’s urban limits. They found ‘significant development opportunity for new housing on plan-enabled residentially zoned land within Auckland’s built up area’, including new parcels, free-standing vacant land, and newly subdivided sites not yet built on. The study found the main reason owners of vacant, residentially zoned sites weren’t developing their land, was because the benefits of holding on for later speculative profits outweighed financial and building risks and development costs.

The potential for housing development on readily available land doesn’t seem get to the attention it deserves, with a “strong bias toward greenfield development on the urban fringe” according to the report. That bias in favour of greenfields development has been accelerated for the long term with the removal of the Auckland Regional Council and the Metropolitan Urban Limit, and in the short term through the fast tracked Special Housing Area sites, brought in through the Housing Accord between the Council and the Government. There’s actually a lot of residential land currently available, and lots also being built on – if you haven’t noticed Kumeu, Riverhead, Westgate, Hobsonville, Silverdale, Pokeno, Karaka, Long Bay, Orewa and more. The Unitary Plan indicates relentless more capacity though infrastructure servicing is not so well provided.

But a sudden rush of land supply hasn’t helped speed up additional housing availability, with few houses developed in the SHAs so far. Given the limited capacity of the building industry, and existing trade shortages, only so many houses can be built in so much time. And even in a setting of unlimited land supply, owners will still stage the release of property for sale to retain a premium and not flood the market.

Housing availability through land supply doesn’t necessarily lead to housing affordability either. About 1000 new houses are currently being built in my hometown of Kumeu, with another 2,500 expedited through local SHAs. But still, large houses on small sites are on the market for around $900,000. The word around town is that both offshore and domestic investors are buying many of them for rental and capital gains.

The Reserve Bank refers to the ‘tax preferred status of housing, especially investor-related housing”, driving speculation, and prices up. The potential for tax free capital gains provides a pretty strong incentive for those with equity to buy and sell property in any context. If you’re lucky enough to already own property in Auckland, or somehow have enough equity, you can make money quick by getting on the property ladder and becoming a landlord and speculator. That drives the prices up for everyone else and further locks low income earners out of the market.

TV programmes like ‘The Block’, and ‘Our First Home’ celebrate quick and dirty property speculation and the resulting capital gains, trading houses like they’re disposable commodities. In ‘Our First Home’, the winning speculators “pocketed $194,000 profit” over the course of the 10 week competition.
The Auckland housing economy in particular is like a game of monopoly, where winners and losers are clearly defined and sitting at opposite sides of the table. -Fortunes are not decided by virtue or hard work, but by access to property ownership and the ongoing financial leverage it provides in a predominantly housing economy. But housing is a human right, it shouldn’t be left to chance, -or the free market.

Christine Rose is employed as Kauri DieBack Community Co-ordinator in a contract role to the Auckland Council. All opinions expressed herein are Christine’s own. No opinion or views expressed in this blog or any other media, shall be construed as the opinion of the Council or any other organisation.

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GUEST BLOG: Douglas Renwick – The Political Economy of Thought Control

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There is a history behind thought control, it goes way back to classical Greece, where the ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were concerned about what an ideal state would be. Some of their developments carry on right through to the present and have had very significant success, especially in democratic nations. For example the modern development of fear ideology can be traced as far back as Aristotle (and maybe further) in his book ‘Politics’. He was interested in how a state could avoid revolution; there was a strategy which he gave that I will quote. “States are preserved when their destroyers are at a distance, and sometimes also because they are near, for fear of them makes the government keep in hand the state. Wherefore the ruler who has a care of the state should invent terrors, and bring distant dangers near, in order that the citizens may be on their guard, and, like sentinels in their night-watch, never relax their attention. He should endeavor too by help of the laws to control the contentions and quarrels of the notables, and to prevent those who have not hitherto taken part in them from being drawn in.”[i] In today’s time crime and the terror threat seem to be the main ‘invented terrors’ which are employed by the mass media. I will elaborate on this a bit more later on.

Thought control has always been prevalent as a way to control populations, but it never really took off until the 1920’s. Until then, workers could be beaten up by the police, which was the main way to control them. The philosopher Noam Chomsky summed it up well, saying ‘propaganda is to democracy, as violence is to a dictatorship’. The propaganda in dictatorships is inferior and much less believable than the propaganda in democracies, but it doesn’t matter as much in dictatorships since they can use violence to control people anyway. However, in a democracy propaganda has to be much better, and it has to work on the people who are part of the political class: people who do more than just take orders, and have the spare time, under no threat from state violence, and would otherwise use their privilege to liberate people from the injustices of really existing capitalism.

There is an interesting book written by one of the main developers of what was then called ‘propaganda’ during the 1920’s by an intellectual called Edward Bernays, he had created very successful propaganda campaigns in order to convince women to smoke. In his book simply titled ‘propaganda’, he points out in the very first sentence that ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’[ii] In his book he outlines the different ways propaganda can be used in education, political leadership, business, ect. Going on, he points out that “The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mould the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.”[iii] After world war two, Edward Bernays said that propaganda came to have negative connotations because of the Nazis, so they just stuck to calling it Public Relations instead.

A bit earlier than Edward Bernays book was one written by the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, who I think developed the early ideas behind the political economy of free thought in his book “Free thought and Official Propaganda”. He noted that “Legal penalties are in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence.”[iv] He went on to say that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. And that if all arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.[v] I think this is pretty much the way thought is controlled up until present day society in democracies. For example, when New Zealand underwent its neoliberal revolution in the 1980’s and 1990’s, economists who were critical of the economic theories that were given were dismissed, in some cases had their research grants cut or were driven from the media. This is been written about by the journalist Bruce Jesson and Professor Jane Kelsey[vi]. Although I do not know much more than this, since it does not seem to be studied. Some of what Bertrand Russell said is truer in our time than was in his. With the massive increase in public relations, arguments favorable to powerful institutions are easily presented to the media while the real stories have to be diligently searched for.

However, the idea that the modern news media would want people with views of their interests, and to prevent people in the news that had views that go against corporate interests was expressed quite eloquently by the American Justice Lewis Powell, back then he was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, who wrote in a memorandum to the US chamber of commerce that “The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on “public relations” or “governmental affairs” — two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums.”[vii] His point is exactly correct. Private power is intolerable to human beings, as constant resistance to it has shown throughout history, and this was recognized by Powell at the time. For a corporation to maintain profits it must not just fulfil its economic purpose but a political purpose as well. The political purpose, later expanded on in the memo included a massive overhaul of the media and educational system.

The use of thought control is much celebrated by the elite in New Zealand, and has become a deeply engrained part of culture, used by all the large business, all the main political parties, and the media. For example, in the general election of 2005, Don Brash won an award for best advertisement campaign of the year.[viii] The New Zealand Herald made their own contribution to supporting the propaganda by calling nationals billboards ‘elegantly simple and humorous’.[ix]

 

THE INSTITUTION

A question that I think ought to be asked when examining any institution is ‘how is this institution arranged, and how should we expect it to behave because of this arrangement?’ There is a standard institutional analysis that is given by market ideologues in favor of the commercial news media. The argument states that the commercial media is in a competitive market for a share of the audiences. That superior journalism will attract the larger audience size and put the news corporation with inferior journalism out of business, therefore the market gives the audiences what they want.

On close examination of the institutional structure of the media, this argument seems to be nearly the exact opposite of the truth. It’s actually the case that the media is in an oligopolistic market competing for a share of the advertisers, not audiences. The tendency towards oligarchy is the natural evolution of the media in a capitalist environment. Competition eliminates competition, since it gives way to an increasingly concentrated media after a long enough time period. In Britain and America during the nineteenth century, there was a radical press which unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world. However, over time because of the industrialization of the press, costs for breakeven with a newspaper increased considerably. In New York City, in 1851 the start-up cost of a newspaper was $69,000, but by 1920 newspapers were selling for between $6million and $18million.[x] In New Zealand, the broadcast media was mostly handed over to a private power from the 1980’s labour government and early 1990’s national government.[xi] From there the media has become almost completely totalitarian, since corporations are by definition totalitarian institutions. In a corporation decisions are made in secret by a few at the top, and then they get pushed downwards through the hierarchy, that’s the definition of totalitarianism. And the New Zealand media is now mostly owned by foreign financial institutions, and some wealthy people including a well-known climate change denier, Gina Rinehart.[xii]

Advertisers have also played a huge role in shaping the media, as before there were advertisers, a newspaper had to make sell their paper for more than the manufacturing cost to make a profit. However, advertisers can allow newspapers to profit even by selling the paper for less than its manufacturing cost. For television, advertising is where virtually all profits are made, since the audience is not paying for television, (unless it’s a subscription). To take an example of how huge a role advertisers have, during the 1960’s in Britain there were 4.7 million subscribers to a social democratic press, the Daily Herald. It had more readers than the Times, the Financial Times, and the Guardian combined.[xiii] However, it was still unable to compete and went out of business, since advertisers discriminated against the newspaper because the readers were poor. Advertising diamonds and cars to people in the slums tends not to be a profitable business.

Another feature of the media is that costs are reduced through Public Relations. So for example, it is much easier to get news from government, military or corporate PR releases who would love to shape the news in their interest, than for journalists to be researching news themselves. The political economist Robert McChesney notes that in America, in 1960 there were .75 PR agents for every working journalist. In 1990 there was two PR agents for every journalist, 2012 saw a ratio of 4 PR agents to every journalist.[xiv] There has been a similar trend in New Zealand and throughout so-called democracies in general.

These three institutional arrangements that I have given- ownership, advertising, and sourcing were called ‘filters’ for a propaganda model developed by two academics Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent. Their model allowed them to predict the behavior of how the establishment liberal media would downplay the genocides, murders or elections that America supported, and be indignant of genocides, murders or elections that were not supported. The model will also act in horror of the crimes of enemies by describing them in gruesome detail, while the crimes supported by America, when reported at all were reported blandly, with no horrific details. This model has had extremely accurate predictability up to the present. My superficial impression of the New Zealand media is that they would fit this model pretty well, although not as well as the American mass media, since we are no imperial power.

The model goes far beyond just foreign policy, but would attempt to control thought on anything that allows for business interests to grow. It’s interesting to look at the mass media reporting on crime in this country. Reporting on crime has gone way up under the neoliberal period.[xv] While crime has actually gone down. This has had an effect on the general population, 83% of whom think that crime has been increasing.[xvi] For the media I think this has had a dual effect of both increasing profits through sensationalism, but also through atomizing the population, breaking down social bonds and creating an environment of the passive individual consumer. I can’t prove the latter is the case, but it is typical of systems of power to use fear to atomize people.

 

THE INTERNET

Some commentators have suggested the internet being a good medium to support journalism. There is an interesting book by Political Scientist Robert McChesney called ‘Digital Disconnect’ which traces the development of the internet, and the role it may have on journalism. The problem with the internet is much the same as the problem with print media. Journalists need advertisers or subscribers to survive. There’s a dichotomy, either you produce news in the advertisers interest and make money, or you produce news in your own interest but don’t get paid. It is very rare that someone on the internet would be able to spend time on doing real journalism for free. Because of this, real journalism on the internet has hardly even happened yet. There is a lot of good information on the internet that would not be found in the print media; however this information requires searching to find it. If people don’t know to search for this information then they cannot find it except by chance.

As for economic forces on the internet, the internet is extremely conducive for monopoly. For example when people use Google’s search engine or Facebook, everyone gains by sharing the single service, so these companies tend towards monopoly at frightening speed. These internet companies then lock a hold onto their monopoly with cloud computing, which is a substantial capital investment in warehouses of computers which allow them to store vast amounts of material on the servers, allowing their product to run more efficiently. This creates a high barrier to entry.[xvii] McChesney thinks that If anyone is to make money doing online journalism, it will almost certainly be as a large centralized operation, a monopoly or close to it.[xviii]

 

[i] P209 Politics: Aristotle

[ii] P1 Propaganda: Edward Bernays

[iii] P11 ibid

[iv] P3 Free Thought and official Propaganda: Bertrand Russell

[v] P3 ibid

[vi] P71 Fragments of the Labour Government: Bruce Jesson. Chapter ‘The Social Deficit’, The New Zealand Experiment: Jane Kelsey

[vii] http://law2.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellMemorandumTypescript.pdf

[viii] P275 Hollow Men: Nicky Hager

[ix] P186 Ibid

[x] P4 Manufacturing Consent: Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

[xi] For a more detailed description of this, read http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/05.html News before Profits: Bill Rosenberg

[xii] P14 JMAD Media Ownership Report. http://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/509723/JMAD-New-Zealand-Media-Ownership-Report-2014_2.pdf

[xiii] P15 Manufacturing Consent: Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

[xiv] P183 Digital Disconnect: Robert McChesney

[xiv] P132-138 ibid

[xv] P218

[xvi] http://www.rethinking.org.nz/assets/Newsletter_PDF/Issue_94/Synod_Prison_Task_Group_Incarceration_in_NZ.pdf

[xviii] P190 Digital Disconnect: Robert McChesney

 

Douglas Renwick is a young adult studying mathematics and philosophy at Victoria University. In matters of politics and economics he is entirely self educated. His political goal is to defend humans from the massive assault on rationality led by corporate and state institutions.

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New class war; not at all like before

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It’s too easy to respond to a story about debt in a ‘woe is us’ kind of way. Debt is neither good nor bad. It simply is. It’s one half of a relationship; a relationship between debtors and creditors commonly mediated through a chaperone, such as a bank. Strictly, in modern financial times, it’s a relationship between a group of debtors (a debtor class) and a group of creditors (a saver class), usually intermediated by a profit-seeking business such as a bank.

One person, in response to my last week’s blog Young Debt, said what many presume: “The problem with debt is that, eventually, it has to be paid back”. This is not strictly true.

Conventionally debt has to be ‘serviced’, and that may involve it being paid back by individual debtors. But most creditors are not at all interested in being paid back. Certainly the saver class, as a class, has no interest in being paid back. Its raison d’être is to accumulate entitlements, to ‘make money’ instead of being paid back in stuff. When this happens – as it usually does – the goods and services foregone as debt service must be consumed by the very debtor class that forewent those goods and services. What is paid back by one debtor typically is consumed, not by the creditor, but by another debtor

(A debt contract is a contract in which a creditor cedes an amount of stuff – goods and services – to a debtor in return for that debtor foregoing, as a lump sum or in instalments, a contracted amount of stuff in the future. If the future amount of stuff is greater than the present amount of stuff, then we can say that the rate of interest on this contract is positive. The debt is settled – repaid – only when the creditor completes delivery of the foregone stuff. Otherwise the liability is simply reshuffled within the debtor class; and that liability increases if the interest rate was positive.)

The more general meaning of debt service is to pay interest. But the debtor class doesn’t actually do that either, because the saver class exists to accumulate compound interest. Compound interest is what happens when creditors refuse to consume the goods and services that interest represents. Instead they cede it back to the debtor class.

Collectively the saver class believes it is entitled to receive, from the debtor class, goods and services valued at many times the world’s GDP. It’s a fiction that will practically never be a problem however, because by their very nature the saver class does not actually want ‘the bag’ (of stuff). No, it wants the money, unspent – the entitlement, unrealised – content for the debtor class to keep enjoying the bag and all its consumerist goodies. (Many of us will remember Selwyn Toogood and more recently John Hawkesby; host of the game show ‘The Money or the Bag?’)

The saver class relies totally on the debtor class having the stuff while it has the money for itself. The saver class makes its money through a combination of selling stuff to the debtor class and compounding interest against the debtor class. The debt of the debtor class is the wealth of the saver class. Liquidation of that debt represents a loss of saver ‘wealth’.

Interest is the price that debtors pay to savers when savers are scarce and wannabe borrowers are abundant. Economists have traditionally assumed the world has always been like that and always will be like that; scarce savers and abundant borrowers. Well, the relative scarcities have reversed; the world has become debt resistant. Many economists, shocked by the new reality that has dawned in 2015, have become transfixed. Few in this part of the world have noticed this herd of elephants stampeding towards our living rooms.

Interest is also the price that savers pay to debtors when wannabe borrowers are scarce and savers are abundant. That’s the underlying financial reality of the 2010s and possibly will be for the remainder of this century. Welcome to the world of negative interest rates. It’s explicit in Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. In many other countries – the Eurozone and Japan – it’s explicitly zero but implicitly negative. Already, in 2015. In the OECD it’s mainly Australasia that’s still playing Canute.

Debt is not a sin. Debt is simply the complement of credit. In today’s brave new world, debt is an accommodation of saving that must be induced by an interest rate that clears the market. Under contemporary conditions, savers are having to pay debtors to spend on their behalf. Compound interest reverses; it unwinds. Absolutely a good thing. The conventional story of interest as a reward for thrift is in fact only half the story. Interest may also be a penalty for thrift. Interest is a payment that can go in either direction, depending on prevailing circumstances.

Negative interest rates are not quite as novel as many of us think. In the late 1970s and early 1980s we had interest rates well below inflation rates. That was the main reason for the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. The saver class has a very strong sense of entitlement; an entitlement to receive a bounty from the debtor class. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, compound interest was unwinding; savers were effectively giving stuff to the debtor class.

The response of the saver class was threefold. First they joined the debtor class, borrowing to buy assets which they hoped would appreciate in value. It was a bit of a punt at the time. House prices and share prices were stagnating in the inflationary late-1970s. Second many savers took to more risky ‘investments’ in order to receive above zero ‘real’ returns on their savings. Thirdly they favoured monetary policies that obliged central banks to set interest rates above the rate of inflation. They introduced a specious argument for such policies; a claim that low interest rates were somehow inflationary. The gullible left even bought that argument. Look at Europe and the rest of the OECD now to see if low interest rates are inflationary. We now have deflation in the OECD such as few alive have ever witnessed.

Now that we have a substantially electronic monetary system, we can (indeed we must) manage our lives in a market economy with interest rates that properly reflect the abundance of saving and the resistance to debt. Scarce spenders need to be compensated by abundant savers.

There are other things that we can do to arrest the current pattern of most of the world’s income going to those who least want to spend it. (Indeed many such people have so much income that much of the spending that they do is obscene in the context of the needs of so many others.) We can use democratic processes to change income distribution rules that presently favour individually-held property over collectively stewarded property. However, unwinding the savings glut through negatively compounding interest rates needs be part of the mix.

Capitalism depends on the spending of the poor, the indebted, and the poor indebted. Yes, maybe there is another -ism out there to replace capitalism. Myself, I prefer an internal revolution within capitalism to the replacement of capitalism with some -ism that supplants the price mechanism as our principal means of allocating resources.

Negative ‘nominal’ interest rates – the emerging reality of our financial marketplace – represent the price mechanism at its heroic best. In the 1930s’ Great Depression the possibility of negative rates was thwarted by people hoarding cash in the bottom drawer rather than paying the banks to recycle their unspent money. Today there are ways to discount hoarded cash.

It is the saver class, not the working class, who will rebel against capitalism this century. In the 1980s the saver class revolted successfully, paying themselves interest at distorted prices which they themselves controlled. It is now up to the debtor classes to save capitalism for the downtrodden; to spend money they haven’t received. In capitalism, someone must have the bag.

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KiwiRail can’t outsource responsibility

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The government must guarantee New Zealanders that Chinese engineers working on KiwiRail’s locomotives are at least receiving the minimum wage says Rail and Maritime Transport Union spokesperson Todd Valster.

“Last year the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment launched an investigation into allegations that Chinese workers at the Hutt Railway Workshops were being paid as little as $3 an hour”.

“Yet the investigation hit a dead end. It has been revealed that the company undertaking warranty work on KiwiRail’s new locomotives – China CNR Corporation – refused to surrender its wage records to New Zealand authorities” says Todd Valster.

“KiwiRail’s Chinese-built locomotives needed warranty work because the manufacturers had used asbestos in the engine rooms and cabs”.

“This situation would not have happened if KiwiRail commissioned locally assembled locomotives. Building and assembling locomotives could have happened at KiwiRail’s Hutt Workshops” says Todd Valster.

“Outsourcing must stop. Will the CEO of KiwiRail and the Minister of Transport outsource their jobs next or buy asbestos riddled cars” asks Todd Valster.

“The Chinese engineers are doing warranty work, but that should not mean KiwiRail can avoid its responsibility to ensure compliance with New Zealand wage standards. It is a repeat of the foreign fishing vessels and the exploitation of migrant workers.

All companies and all employees working in New Zealand must be covered under New Zealand’s labour laws. The RMTU is calling for a new investigation with greater powers” says Todd Valster.

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Fast food workers rally against zero hour contracts

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Mike Treen addressin the Auckland strike and rally against zero hours on April 15

Hundreds of fast food workers took action around around New Zealand on Wednesday, April 15, and rallied to call for an end to Zero Hour Contracts

Striking McDonalds’ workers took part in marches and pickets in Auckland, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin on Wednesday, many speaking to the crowds and to the media about the hardship of living with insecure work and income.

The actions in New Zealand kicked off an international day of action by fast food workers targeting low pay, insecure hours and the lack of union rights.

In Auckland 300 workers and supporters (many from other unions) marched up Queen Street, stopping to congratulate workers at Burger King and Starbucks stores who will have secure hours within months and picketing McDonald’s and Wendy’s stores.

Images from the day can be found on our flickr site.

Support from the public was huge, with many bystanders stopping to wish the workers good luck and expressing disgust at McDonald’s failure to commit to ending zero hours.

In Wellington around 150 workers and supporters gathered outside a central city restaurant, convincing many potential customers to eat elsewhere.

Palmerston North saw a community picket of the Rangitikei Street McDonald’s, with union organiser Bonita Belworthy gathering with 30 workers and supporters to let the local McDonalds’ franchisee know that public want them to abandon the contracts now.

Dunedin and Christchurch both had great turn-out on a cold evening to finish off a huge day of action.

Rallies targeted McDonald’s restaurants after negotiations broke down again on Tuesday.

McDonald’s and Wendy’s are the only major fast food chains to not have reached agreement with Unite Union on ending zero hours.

McDonald’s have been running a deliberate strategy to delay reaching an agreement until the contract expired so they could pay all non-union staff an increase based on the 50 cent an hour increase the minimum wage from April 1. Some franchisees have even illegally refused to increase the minimum wage for union members!

The underlying profitability of the industry was underscored by Restaurant Brands announcing a 20% boost to their profits for last year. Restaurant Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Carl’s Jr and Starbucks) was the first to offer to end zero hour contracts and a new collective agreement was signed that guarantees at least 80% of average hours worked over the previous three months. We are also trialling fixed shifts which remain the same from week to week so workers can plan ahead. Both sides assume this will be the end result of a guaranteed hours regime.

Russell McCreedy the Restaurant Brands chief executive continues to claim that they didn’t really have zero hour contracts but that is complete nonsense. Their employment agreements very clearly said: “There is no guarantee that an Employee will be required to work any hours in any given week.”

Burger King have also offered to end zero hours and move to fixed shifts with guaranteed hours within six months. We haven’t yet signed an agreement with them as there remains some outstanding issues around the failure of the company to allow staff to move off the minimum wage. 80% of staff currently remain on the minimum wage despite years of service in many cases.

McDonald’s made a deliberately deceptive offer to the union that claimed to get rid of zero hours and released that offer to the public while we were in bargaining. They said they would guarantee 80% of rostered hours. That formula is simply nonsense. Any company can guarantee 100% of rostered hours because they control the roster. Rosters go up and down. They are at the discretion of the company. The union can’t see them or enforce anything to do with them. On average workers work 20% more than their rostered hours because over employing and under rostering is the essence of the zero hours regime. It keeps workers willing to jump at offers of more hours. That is why we decided to use the formula of 80% of hours worked with Restaurant Brands. We can monitor and enforce that formula.

Wendy’s have also failed to offer guaranteed hours. They also claim that they roster everyone some hours each week. That may be true but the number of hours is completely at the discretion of the company. The use of rosters to reward and punish remains there. Just this week I had a Wendy’s worker in tears because she was being refused a sick leave day and was scared to argue with the company over the matter because she feared her hours being cut the following week.

Sally’s story and why we need to end zero hour contracts

Unite remains determined to end zero hour contract regime at Wendy’s and McDonald’s. Here is the reason why.Last night I had a McDonald’s worker tell me her story. It is not unusual. I will call her Sally but that is not her real name. She is also concerned at the possibility of being victimised by the McDonald’s franchise owner who employs her.
Sally moved into West Auckland around September 2013. She needed work and went to WINZ for support. After six months she was taken to a local McDonald’s franchisee for a job. She had actually worked at Macca’s before so that was no problem.She said she was available for work seven days a week from 6am to 9pm. She said she needed at least 20 hours a week just to feed herself but wanted 40. She was told she would start on at least 15 but that would improve as she showed she could do the work. WINZ offered to subsidise her wages during the initial period of short hours but she said no as she was confident they would improve quickly. Very soon she was working 30 plus hours a week and WINZ checked with her that that was the case.
Sally thinks that the franchisee was given a subsidy from WINZ for taking her off the benefit.Shortly after that however the franchise owner started to cut her hours back to only 15 to 18 hours a week. Sally was constantly hungry. For a period she was reduced to eating bread and potatoes. She also had a sick father staying with her but the combined income of a sickness benefit and the McWage from McDonald;s just wasn’t enough. She remembered with sadness that she couldn’t by her brother a birthday present. Bills piled up.

After repeated complaints to her managers that she needed at least 20 hours just to eat the hours were put back up again to 20 to 25. This was still not enough to live properly as she also had bills that had accumulated that needed clearing.

She has been at the franchise for a little over one year now. During that period he has constantly hired new staff. She has never been offered hours of existing staff who have left even though she has very open availability. However she was one of those who was always being called up on her days off to cover for others. She was deliberately being kept “hungry for hours” as she put it to me.

Sally’s case is not unusual. We have had McDonald’s taking staff from WINZ and getting a wage subsidy for six months by guaranteeing them 30 hours a week for that period. But when the subsidy expires the workers go on the same contract as everyone else – a zero hours one with no guaranteed hours. Previously Unite has questioned why a profitable company like McDonald’s had received at least $270,000 from WINZ as a wage subsidy between July 2009 and June 2013.

The zero hours regime is not a rostering mechanism. It is a tool to bully and abuse staff. It shouldn’t exist in the 21st Century in New Zealand. That is the message that needs to be continually delivered to McDonald’s and Wendy’s over the coming months.The government needs to also get the message. Some of the statements from the Minister responsible have been slippery in the extreme as to what type of contracts will be covered by the promised legislation against zero hour contracts. The key thing to watch for is whether he restricts the ban to situations where workers are sitting at home waiting for a phone call to come to work. That is only the most extreme type of zero hour contract.

Most workers covered by a zero hour contract do end up on a roster a week in advance but they still have no control over how many hours they work and limited control over when they work.The Restaurant Association of New Zealand has made this explicit in a draft contract they use for restaurant owners in NZ which simply says you will be available 365 days a year and work whatever day or time we roster you!

There will be another national day of action to end zero hour contracts on Friday May 1 – International workers day. Contact Unite if you can help on that day.

MEDIA LINKS TO APRIL 15 ACTION AGAINST ZERO HOUR

Wellington Video (NZ Herald website) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/national/news/video.cfm?c_id=1503075&gal_cid=1503075&gallery_id=149306

Palmerston North and Wellington Video and report (Stuff.co.nzhttp://www.stuff.co.nz/business/67756727/mcdonalds-staff-strike-over-zero-hours

TVNZ 6pm news http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/mcdonalds-locked-in-stalemate-workers-video-6288863

NZ Herald: Editorial: Guarantee minimum work hours http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11433292

NZ Herald: McDonald’s offers fresh contract talks
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11433264

Morning Report: Union targets McDonald’s in ramped up contracts campaignhttp://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/20174923/union-targets-mcdonalds-in-ramped-up-contract-campaign

AUDIO: STRIKES AT MCDONALD’S SITES TODAY OVER ZERO-HOUR CONTRACTS http://www.radiolive.co.nz/AUDIO-Strikes-at-McDonalds-sites-today-over-zero-hour-contracts/tabid/506/articleID/79009/Default.aspx

ZB Radio with Mike Hoskings:
Mike Treen: Union strike http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/mike-hosking-breakfast-with-asb/audio/mike-treen-union-strike/
Chris Hutton: McDonald’s Strike http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/mike-hosking-breakfast-with-asb/audio/chris-hutton-mcdonalds-strike/

Gerard Hehir on Paul Henry Show (National Radio and TV breakfast show) http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/paulhenry/interviews/mcdonalds-needs-to-drop-zero-hour-contracts—union#axzz3XLmKhbJx

McDonalds locked in stalemate with workers (1:53http://m.tvnz.co.nz/news/video/business/6287108/?videoId=ref:6288863

Pictures: ‘End zero hour contracts!’ – McDonald’s staff stand in solidarity http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/pictures-end-zero-hour-contracts-mcdonald-s-staff-stand-in-solidarity-6287108

Campbell Live:McDonald’s customers’ thoughts on zero-hour contracts McDonald’s customers’ thoughts on zero-hour contracts http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/mcdonalds-customers-thoughts-on-zero-hour-contracts-2015041519#axzz3XHD7try4

Maori TV: Protesters demand an end to ‘zero-hours’ contract http://www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/protesters-demand-end-zero-hours-contracts

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Can Labour not be racist as National face water ownership gauntlet?

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John Key has 99 problems and Maori ownership of fresh water is one of them.

The question is can Labour resist being racist about this.

The dilemma is entirely of National’s own making. The issue of fresh water ownership has only come to pass because National privatised energy companies who were reliant on hydro.

Once National had severed the public ownership of water it opened the legal issue of Maori ownership. Key now has to play a difficult balancing act between telling the Iwi Leaders Group what they need to hear about water rights and desperately hushing the reactionary redneck element of the rural-provincial rump of National who see Maori water rights as the end of times.

Hushing those hard white NZers who view the world through very narrow terms will be difficult. Last time this level of paranoia was whipped up by the hard white of NZ, it was over the totally manufactured ‘Maori want all the beaches’ racist panic attack that led to Labour’s appalling land confiscation of the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

It’s important to remind ourselves that the Maori legal challenge that started that conflict over the foreshore and seabed came about only after the Marlborough District Council decided they could sell land titles to glorified boat houses without asking for local Iwi consent because the Marlborough District Council decided they didn’t have to consult with Iwi. In both cases, Maori have only sought legal recourse when local Government or central Government have decided to privatise previously public resources.

These points always get lost in the roar from the knee-jerk outcry middle NZ always deteriorate to whenever Maori attempt to enforce their sovereignty.

None of this matters to the hard white. That Maori are merely fighting for their rights after local or central Government privatise publicly shared resources is lost on them and this makes things very dangerous for National.

Key has to give the Iwi Leadership Group water ownership, he doesn’t have a choice. He’s privatised the water, so he has to offer something back to Maori which acknowledges Maori ownership rights. The problem is that this would be understood locally as paying for water and grate long held racist suspicions of Maori sovereignty.

Northland proved that the regions feel they have been denied any fruits from the Rock Star Economy, add to this resentment the sudden threat of paying for water with the ugly sneer of bigotry and you have all the possible political tension of a Don Brash Orewa speech.

As Judith Collins plots her revenge, will she pick up the dog whistle and blow as she positions for post Key? Will Winston? And if Winston wins, can he make a deal with Labour work if he’s Maori bashed too much?

Or would Labour go there if Key cuts a deal that becomes a lightening rod?

For Labour the argument should be ‘Key has brought this upon himself, if he hadn’t privatised water in the first place we wouldn’t have this legal action by Maori. Labour will nationalise those assets and negotiate directly with Iwi to ensure water is owned by all NZers”.

What might happen is David Shearer, Kelvin Davis and Stuart Nash are let off the leash to do some TV interviews where they belittle Maori aspirations in a ‘we can be anti radical Maaaoris too’ media sound bite tour where one of them (probably Shearer) will hold up the Foreshore and Seabed land confiscation as proof positive that Labour can do the ‘right thing’ on Maori rights.

What will probably happen however is the issue blindsides Labour while they are all standing to attention desperately attempting to show that they are all unified.

 

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