Why we urgently need more from the Left economically than the low hanging fruit of middle class identity politics
Comrades.
I fear that we are not ready for this jelly…
$13 trillion wiped off markets in worst six months on record
The global market rout has wiped $13 trillion off world stocks in the worst start to any year on record as business and consumer confidence collapses amid surging inflation.
The MSCI World Equity Index has shed more than 20pc so far this year in the steepest first-half decline since its creation, led by a plunge in loss-making tech companies as investors panic over the end of ultra-low interest rates.
In the UK, the FTSE 100 fell 1.96pc on Thursday to close out its worst month since the early days of the Covid pandemic.
…since 2008, Central Banks, in a desperate move to gloss over the obscene greed and malfeasance of Corporate Banks, printed $25Trillion which kicked the can of reckoning down the road for a decade.
We’ve run out of road and US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell is being very clear that shit is about to hit the fan…
Powell: ‘No guarantee’ US Fed can tame inflation, spare jobs
United States Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said there’s “no guarantee” the central bank can tame runaway inflation without hurting the job market.
Speaking on Wednesday (US time) at a European Central Bank forum in Sintra, Portugal, Powell repeated his hope that the Fed can achieve a so-called soft landing – raising interest rates just enough to slow the economy and rein in surging consumer prices without causing a recession and sharply raising the unemployment rate.
“We believe we can do that. That is our aim,” he said.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said, had made the job more difficult by disrupting commerce and driving up the price of food, energy and chemicals.
…the quantitive easing has artificially created the lowest interest rate in 5000 years.
Inflation never raised its hideous hegemony upturning head since 2008 because global supply chains reaching into the deepest darkest part of non unionised labour camps in China, India, Bangladesh, etc etc etc, kept labour costs suppressed in the West as domestic working classes were sacrificed for $700 iPhones.
That sacrifice came at the political cost of Trump in America and Brexit in the UK.
The pandemic however has destroyed those supply chains and geopolitical fiction is forcing Western Transnationals to pull their supply chains, with all the increased labour and environmental costs that entails, into friendly ally territory.
Supply side stresses can’t be solved by macro inflation adjustment without enormous implosions as the true gravity of all that debt collapses in upon itself in an event horizon of a steep and deep economic depression…
There is ample reason to believe that the next recession will be marked by a severe stagflationary debt crisis. As a share of global GDP, private and public debt levels are much higher today than in the past, having risen from 200% in 1999 to 350% today (with a particularly sharp increase since the start of the pandemic). Under these conditions, rapid normalisation of monetary policy and rising interest rates will drive highly leveraged zombie households, companies, financial institutions, and governments into bankruptcy and default.
The next crisis will not be like its predecessors. In the 1970s, we had stagflation but no massive debt crises because debt levels were low. After 2008, we had a debt crisis followed by low inflation or deflation because the credit crunch had generated a negative demand shock. Today, we face supply shocks in a context of much higher debt levels, implying that we are heading for a combination of 1970s-style stagflation and 2008-style debt crises – that is, a stagflationary debt crisis.
…my point is that an economic depression generated by geopolitical friction beyond our control is going to hit us with enormous social damage and political carnage.
The Left must be ready for this moment.
Unfortunately our focus is on alienating woke dogma virtue signals like hate speech, booze prohibition, or painting out the Lion King in Te Reo as the greatest cultural achievement since Shakespeare.
We need less alienating pronoun policing on the Left and more focus on universal services that provide material well being to people who are hurting right now and will be suffering in 6 months.
We need solutions to economic turmoil that isn’t going to dissipate.
We need to lift the yoke of taxation off working people, the middle classes and beneficiaries and put it onto the 1% richest, the corporations, the banks and the speculators!
Look at the banks laughing all the way to themselves thanks to the rigged capitalism they manipulate for their Australian masters…
Banks post record profits and close in on $5 billion in interest income as mortgage costs spiral
The total interest hoovered up by the banks from households and businesses is on track to top $5 billion a quarter as home loan interest rates rise, KPMG says.
…we need a financial traction tax, GST off food, sugar tax, first $20 000 tax free.
We need vastly more money poured directly into our welfare infrastructure, paying for essential worker education and training like Nurses, Teachers, Drs while bonding them here for service.
We need to stop underfunding our services while allowing corporations to plunder us for monopoly rentals!
The danger of woke middle class identity politics replacing class left analysis is that the politics devolve into a micro aggression deplatforming campaign that alienates rather than builds solidarity against free market capitalism.
The true demarcation of power in a democratic capitalist state is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers Vs the 90% rest of us.
Identity Politics simply cements into place a caste system of intersectionism alongside a terminal tribal affiliation to your skin colour, gender or identity.
There needs to be far more common ground and shared values.
We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
The minefield of social justice and it’s never ending pure temple deplatforming of everything that triggers it will only drive people further from the Left in an intense economic downturn because you can’t eat virtue signalling aesthetics.
- $608 million in housing equity was made by landlords
- 9.6% increase in rent for tenants
- 18.4% of children live in households earning less than half the median income after housing costs
- $5.5 billion in profit made by ANZ, BNZ, ASB and Westpac
and the Top 1% own 25% of wealth while the Bottom 50% owns 2% of wealth
If you think the worst inflation in 30 years is bad now, wait until the impact of the Ukrainian war and broken supply chains in China hit.
This debate is how the Class Left rip the talking stick away from the Wellington Twitteratti and the alienating woke activists.
Broad Church over Pure Temple every day!
Look at how far polarisation has been allowed to overtake America with a quarter of Americans open to taking up arms against government.
We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to Corporations.
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There is nothing more economically from the left.
That ship sailed around 1987, but some of you didn’t get the memo.
So an admission that economically the right have failed since 1987.
In fact globally mankind is vastly better off in every measurable way since socialism was found out and largely abandoned in the ‘80’s.
Do you still drive a Lada? LOL
Depends which ‘left’ you are talking about.
Yes the social democratic left is bankrupt and now no more than liberal with no solutions other than to pander to a failing capitalism.
But the Marxist left is still going strong and it predicts the downfall of capitalism as it exhausts the source of its profits to show us what to do about it.
The popular Marxist economics, Michael Roberts, has a slide show that he uses to explain the current global economic situation, the coming slump, climate change, China etc.
https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/marxism-2022.pdf
Ya think the woke are going to give this shit up to focus on the poor?
Give up their cushy govt jobs educating the public service about pro nouns and colonisation and right think?
Ya dreamin
Geez, I’m kinda glad I’ve got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
The Titanic is slowly settling into the icy waters and the orchestra is locked in an argument because “Nearer my God to Thee” isn’t diverse enough.
I hope y’all can swim…
You hit the nail on the head MB.
Unfortunatly greed has evolved so far there’s little chance of a reset, this side of the revolution.
The market needs to wake up to itself and modernise its thinking. If they regard cycles as inevitable on a bell curve pattern, and agree on a point of closure for an economic cycle and wipe all debts and limit credits to enough to live on with some left over to start again with, it would be much more fun for the aficionados. They seem to be only interested in competition, getting wealth is a serious game to them and when they have it they spend it on such things as achieving goals competitively which results in lines of them queued up along the riege leading to Everest!
The people of the world get weighed down by the debt they are in to these power brokers. The game is too easy for them, and at present smirking children can become millionaires from owning houses which are the latest type of oil well to enrich yourself with. Meanwhile people who are not obsessed and slightly mad, huddle under cardboard boxes and increasingly punitive laws to control them to which they react negatively thus increasing the miasma of despair and the downward slide into poverty of mind and penury.
Obsessed people can’t see another way. Where and when can we find someone who can slide between the mind barriers to appease the filthy rich and give them room to set up their challenges and do their plotting and planning, but also prevent them from taking and despoiling the whole world the ba…s. And all the time doing good things, practical positive things with good outcomes for the rest of us, who absolutely must pass some of this goodness down so there is light and support and useful systems for those struggling.
We all need to do something or else the sickness of obsession will spread. To prevent the rest of us from being labelled and fixed as a type to hold up to scare the children – ‘be better, do better of you may end up like them, the filthy obnoxious losers’, we must start now helping each other a bit with what we can spare, and looking for ways to outmanoeuvre the obsessives!
Call me cynical but they will push ahead with their aims (3 Waters, Maori Health) at great cost.
3 Waters at the lowest level of expected increase will add $50 on to homeowner costs a week which no one can afford, let alone, the 1/3 rd who are renting and you know they will pass this cost on to renters and knowing the landlords, probably a bit more just because.
Maori Health is already talking about Housing as being an issue and how they need to do something about that. So less than a week into the job and they have figured out that it is the social determinants of health that matter so much more than the health care provision in terms of meaningful change For a Billion dollars they put in place a solution that could not achieve its expensive aims because they were too dumb to think it through (or always saw it as a platform for overreach).
So in 2023, probably 6 months out from the election we will see He PuaPua and electoral reform (or should that be called the Left Wing weighting reform) rammed through at around about the same time as some huge incentives for voting Labour. Probably the middle class Unemployment scheme and of course something that looks meaningful for the poor but it wont come in until after the election. There will be a few sops here and there in the run up so people dont smell an out and out rat.
Then our caring Govt will give all DOC land to Iwi, Co Governance will come to justice and police and the poor and lower middle will lie trampled on the floor. Expect many more Asian, Pakeha and Young people to leave in large numbers. And no, I am not a right wing schill, it is just so bloody obvious.
Labour will never reform the economy because it simply doesnt have the same values as the rest of us any more. We can all look forward to living in a ‘complimentary democracy’ – you know the democracy that says it is one but really isnt.
Great explanation clearing the road to understanding of extraneous clutter. ‘I can see clearly now the rain has gone’ etc. I think we need to put some clutter back.
I suggest showing The Treasury and other advisors EY type, or …….. (write your own favourites here) and just leave them an unsubscribed postit note (they will get the message) in either pink or blue on their windows doors lifts carpet wherever which is like saying Kilroy* was here, or alternatively write SNAFU** which would cause a similar jolt of comprehension – or misco…
Either pink or blue would do – it will confuse them as they won’t know whether it’s those rotten ‘pinkos’ or ‘true blue’ conservatives that go for probity (but not too much) and capital accretion (piles of money/or piles of assets).
*At some point during WWII, it appears American soldiers started drawing the popular military graffito, featuring the now-familiar tag Kilroy was here. Kilroy was here graffiti followed US soldiers across Europe, reportedly to the confusion and concern of opposing troops, who thought Kilroy might have been a spy.
**While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives).16/03/2018
The difference between a snafu, a shitshow, and a clusterfuck
https://qz.com › work › the-difference-between-a-snafu…
Incidentally the dropping of notes of false clues/mining reports accidentally on purpose in the lobby of the Sydney or Melbourne Stock Exchange was a great way to confuse the market and instrumental in the rocketing and ratcheting up of certain tenuous mining stocks. Not necessarily connected with Poseidon shares going in stages from under $1 to $90 then a Mallard slide! The directors holidayed in Brazil for a
while I believe.
Indeed. We have a great setup for food autarky right here. We should be implementing price controls to keep food cheap for New Zealanders, developing manufacturing capability where we can, and allying with civilized countries that don’t have recent body counts in the tens on millions (i.e. not EU/Germany or America) to fill in the blanks. That would be bad for foreign speculators like Peter Thiel though I guess, so Lationalour won’t be doing it.
Defiantly truth in this op-ed..
One critique is that the ‘1% and their 9% enablers’ statement could be considered a form of identity politics.
Some would seek to dispossess the wealthy as a whole – a mistake. Certainly a nation is NOT going to be wealthy if all its’ citizens are broke. The 20K tax-free-threshold is a great idea.
Breadcrumbs: The truth is, if all personal and public debt was paid in full, their would be no money (New Zealand Dollars). Simply put; the NZD is loaded into existence.
A constraint/thither to excess ‘money printing’ existed in the form of the Gold Standard until 1971. After this point debts governments were owed could NOT be remedied for gold.. rather their redemption would be made in fiat currency, something infinitely printable – hence the price of milk today compared to 1971.
Nobody wakes up and calls their-bank to complain their-account is empty because their-bank has loaned their-balance to a property speculator. No, rather Retail Banks loan NEW money into existence when making loans. This additional money devalues the purchasing power of deposit holders and the poor.
The idea of Tax-&-Spend is largely a fallacy, as shown by the large run up in NZ’s national debt. It could be argued that taxation reduces the money supply and therefore keeps prices stable, unfortunately that’s not reality if the money printing exceeds the taxation.
The only real purpose of taxation in an abused MMT system is to drive demand for and force the use of NZ Dollars.
Now here’s the insight:
Under capitalism, you have to do something for someone else to earn money. Even stock-market-spectators collectively provide a service – Market Making.
Unfortunately when MMT (money printing) becomes abused, capitalism becomes a communist distortion, 3 examples:
1. There is a demand for firefighters, yet the powers that be print more bureaucratic jobs [fire service] there is no demand for.
2. Mental health; the centralized powers print 1 billion+ extra and create more bureaucratic jobs there is no demand for.
3. Education; more money is printed to fund the status quo, their customers (students) aren’t interested in the product.
MONEY PRINTING (abuse of MMT) props up failed academics, media, public instructions, private companies.. ZOMBIES! Those producing in demand products & services are either destroyed by inflation and/or the centralization of power by the money printers.
In the end the comeuppance could very well be the collapse of the NZ Dollar. Whether the rich pay tax is largely irrelevant in a country funded through money printing.
Zack Brando, there is a lot more to Modern Monetary Theory than that!
Yes, but I’m not paid to lecture.
Until big tech is broken up and regulated left v right is irrelevant.
Why has mental illness skyrockeed to unprecedented historic levels since 2011 when Facebook went well and trully mainstream?
We have 2.7 billion people, regardless of their politics, living in their own private Truman show/matrix where nothing they disagree with can penetrate it. We all live in indivual parallel dimensions where we are only shown things that agree with our prejudice by supercomputer algorithms whose only purpose is to reinforce our prejudices and manipulating us into spending more time in our realities and manipulating our opinions.
We’re all guilty of it.left or right. These These tech billionaires are destroying humanity.
This division, this hatred of the other , this social sickness is all a symptom of living in your own matrix and unless we all work together to break big techs experiment on human kind nothing can change, we’ll get nicher and nicher, more and more hateful.
We can’t talk about left v right until society has big tech on a leash.
Regulate. Break up the monopolies. Tax data mining.
Politics is irrelevant unless the politician understands big tech and none of the western world’s politicians do.
Spot on point.
The only thing social media has enabled is that our kids now know first hand what a fucked up vampire squid gangster based society we live in.
Jacinda Ardern always does best in crisis. She should be using a pending recession, soaring inflation and rising interest rates to declare an economic crisis and announce three things she will do to protect New Zealanders from the worse of what’s ahead. Something like (1) Some security around the family home up to a certain value, (2) reduction of the regressive GST from 15% to 7.5% and (3) direct incentives for NZers to train to work in healthcare, education and other sectors with severe staff shortages.
New Zealanders want recognition of the tough times ahead. We know most of inflation is being generated to a number of international factors, and I don’t think NZers blame the Government for this. What we need is the same extraordinary vision and leadership that steered us through Covid to carry us through the looming economic crisis. Ardern can, and should, do this as soon as possible.
Correct napierboy but this will be lost on some that comment on this site.
Martyn. Seriously. Enough. Just re-start Mana. It’s time wasn’t 2012 or whatever. It’s now.
A lot of people from all sides will be willing to help you.
Mana – a catchup of some on google.
June 2020 https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-06-2020/rivalry-over-mana-movement-throws-its-full-support-behind-maori-party-for-2020
2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_Movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_Movement#Extra-parliamentary_activism
August 2021 https://www.maoriparty.org.nz/mana_motuhake
Hone Harawira RadioNZ part of Series on Maori Politicians – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7RcbZn-YJs
Hone Harawira About the vaccination checkpoint in Northland etc:
https://www.maoritelevision.com/tagged/news/Hone%20Harawira?page=1&rows=10