Posts on the economy, work, business, income, and labour
Everyone has recently had an education on “Socialism” working in practice.
And a graphic illustration of the shortcomings, of under regulated “Free market” Capitalism, Globalism, tax cuts for the rich, and the mania for monetising everything in sight, and “running it like a business”.
Neoliberalism has run its course and displayed its profound inability to address inequality issues. It makes the poor get ever poorer while the affluent top 10% ticks of society get bloated and increasingly insufferable on untaxed capital gains. In 2017 Jacinda Ardern set a goal of bringing all children out of poverty within six years. So how is that going? And what are the next steps?
Along with the grey weather, the weather around our local net is downright annoying at present. There are a massive increase in attempts to break into this site via backend systems and brute force front-end logins, a surge in scans from the search engine spider bots, and a lot of requests for putting up paid content. All of which have been ignored or dealt with. Good thing that we aren’t a target like the NZX, banks, mainstream media and the MetService are.
Post Trump how is the world order looking?
The Green Party is facing major push back from members relating to a decision to give shovel ready funding to a private school involved in education about the environment.
National has promised that if it gains power rules designed to improve water quality in our streams and rivers will be “gone by lunchtime.
The Trump administration has declared war on China, and there is much speculation in the punditry as to whether or not this is a new Cold War similar to that waged post World War 2 against Russia. In my opinion, the 19th century Opium Wars may offer a more appropriate analogy, albeit with a likely different outcome.
Covid has fundamentally changed society for the better in surprising ways.
The latest Rogue Poll™ is out. This time it’s UMR’s turn and Judith Collins is on the rise.
Four very good reasons why you should vote Labour in this election.
Central to the Transition movement from the outset has been the idea of resilience. Usually framed as the ability to ‘bounce back’, it is seen in the Transition movement as being better imagined as the capacity to ‘bounce forward’, i.e. to use it as the opportunity to move forward to something better. How then to ‘bounce forward’ from COVID-19 in such a way that we also move to a way of doing things consistent with the scale of the climate crisis?
The latest Roy Morgan poll is out.
Crusher?
Crushed!
In a sign of desperation National has trotted out John Key to campaign that the country’s success in containing Covid should be put to risk because of a misguided perception that it would be good for the economy.
As climate, ecological, pandemic and neoliberal pressures put our food security at risk, we can take heart from the many people who have been developing and practicing sustainable and resilient food growing.
Defying expectations official labour force data from Stats NZ released today shows that the unemployment rate dropped to 4 per cent from 4.2 per cent in the June quarter.
For a party that promised to be a policy factory National’s policy offerings are severely deficient.
Why have we fallen into the most boring and predictable election we’ve had since Bolger’s second term?
The July One News Colmar Brunton poll is out at 6PM. Has Judith Collins worked the oracle? Or is it another of Gerry Brownlee’s rogue polls?
Stay tuned …
UPDATE: Labour in the 50’s, National 32
I’m reasonably happy with where the coalition wound up on the quarantine cost recovery. It sends a clear economic signal to businesses and the fools who want to travel during a global pandemic. It will discourage some of the stupidity of the travel addicted. It also balances the legal position. Something that most of the critics clearly aren’t thinking through and cause them to whine without realistic alternatives
According to our Prime Minister, today’s announcement that New Zealand is suspending extradition arrangements with Hong Kong is because of our principles. But it is not immediately clear what these principles are, other than falling into line with our Five Eyes spying partners. Some history is important.
A few weeks ago we were at 14 million cumulative confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide. A million more cases in just 4 days. Now a few weeks later, we are at 16 million confirmed cases worldwide. The lobbyists and business groups affected by our blocked borders need to get real. We won’t be opening our borders until we get a widely used vaccine later next year (at the earliest). It is too expensive to do so.
There used to be a mantra in New Zealand politics that National were always perceived to be better managers of the economy than Labour. Until now.
There is no blueprint for building a stronger more effective trade union movement. There are many, who each and every day wake up and do exactly that.
The Greens have released a detailed policy document that sets out what they want to achieve if they are part of the next Government and their Labour Relations policies could be considered to be more pro union than Labour’s policies.
What is the strangest recent proposal for development in New Zealand?
Act is proposing to introduce measures that will limit the amount of money people on benefits can spend on alcohol and tobacco. But not guns.
Winston Peters has named the person he says leaked his super details. Has ACT joined National in doing Dirty Politics?
With the government clearly watching the unravelling of Australia’s Covid-19 response and putting in place $14 billion in preparation for a second infection wave, we are clearly now in a history-in-making territory of the highest instability outside a world war.
Another Tory MP has quit. This time it’s first term MP Andrew Falloon.
UPDATE: The PM was informed on Friday, but chose to be discreet.
UPDATE: NewsHub are claiming that Falloon sent porn to a schoolgirl.
UPDATE: The victim was a uni student and her age means no offence was committed. Further, Falloon claims it was not him that sent the pic.
With the simultaneous decline of Southland’s Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, the retrenchment of Waikato/South Auckland’s New Zealand Steel’s Glenbrook Steel mill, and the near-total shrinking of NZ Refining in Whangarei’s Marsden Point it’s not unreasonable to ask what will happen to the 10% of New Zealand who are employed in major manufacturing plants.
Should Labour’s Grant Robertson stand aside in Wellington Central to guarantee the Greens are available to be a coalition partner?
New Zealand’s tourism economy has essentially collapsed, and it is part of a global tourism industry collapse that is so big that it may be permanently smaller. But does it have to be?
The Auckland Central electorate will elect a new MP in September. The Greens have a responsibility to make sure it’s the Labour candidate.
The latest Roy Morgan Poll is further bad news for National and a stark warning for NZ First.
Our Clean Energy Plan is the first part of our transformational proposal to end the use of fossil fuels in Aotearoa. It will help to ensure our grandchildren inherit a world where they can not only survive, but thrive.
My view is that neither big nor small unions function particularly well in the modern-day workforce. There are many notable exceptions to this where both do very good work. But few have found the balance of good local support for members, tackling national and international issues and crucially not wasting considerable time and resource fighting another rival union encroaching on their patch.
