class war
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Privatisation bill passed
Written By: - Date published: 5:17 pm, June 26th, 2012 - 239 comments
They’re quite literally selling our country down the river.
It’s for efficiency
Written By: - Date published: 8:58 am, June 26th, 2012 - 10 comments
Now we learn that directors’ fees are set to double after National sells or assets. Who pays for the fat-cats to get twice the cream for the same work? We do. Through higher power prices. It’s just another cost of privatisation that we all pay – despite the fact that Treasury reckons 95% of us won’t buy shares. No wonder 100,000 of us have signed the referendum petition already.
Endless greed
Written By: - Date published: 11:09 am, June 24th, 2012 - 57 comments
It’s sickening to see rich ministers and columnists saying ‘of course we need to green the economy’ and then turnaround and promote fossil fuel extraction and agricultural intensification – things that will ultimately wreck the environment and the economy that is built on it. The truth is, we’re a hugely wealthy country already – it’s just most of the wealth is with the endlessly greedy elite.
Taxing the super-rich
Written By: - Date published: 10:01 am, June 18th, 2012 - 21 comments
The Nats like bang on about benefit fraud, are they just as keen to go after tax evasion by the super-rich?
The tax-cheating elite
Written By: - Date published: 1:39 pm, June 16th, 2012 - 137 comments
For 10 years, the IRD has been investigating the tax dealings of the country’s 250 richest people and their 7,500 companies and trusts. It turns out they had underpaid $500m of tax with hundreds of millions more in dispute. If you and I went into a government office and stole $10,000 of stuff, we would go to jail. But ripping us off for $500m was all just a mistake, apparently.
How much will you pay for a assets ‘loyalty scheme’?
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, June 15th, 2012 - 17 comments
Most Kiwis won’t be able to afford to pay to buy what we already own when National sells our assets. When they sold Contact, only 5% of us got shares. You know who will buy the shares. Not your working families. Not Key’s new army of the unemployed. It’ll be the people who won big from National’s tax cuts. Now, to add insult to injury, Key is looking at making you and me pay a bonus to these people.
Can you jump a shark in that pool?
Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, June 14th, 2012 - 34 comments
The game is rigged
Written By: - Date published: 8:50 am, June 12th, 2012 - 5 comments
Times are tight, right? You’ve probably been told that when your boss says you can’t have a pay rise that keeps up with inflation. Yeah, well. It seems that doesn’t apply to managers. The largest jump in median weekly income has been for managers – twice the change across all workers. In hourly terms, no-one is keeping up with inflation. Welcome to the brighter future.
The Nats’ agenda
Written By: - Date published: 11:23 am, June 9th, 2012 - 30 comments
You don’t usually see it stated as succinctly as this.
The politics of reproduction
Written By: - Date published: 9:59 am, June 3rd, 2012 - 236 comments
The Nats have a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with the politics of reproduction. They’re talking about “stopping ‘unfit’ parents reproducing”, but Paula Bennet let slip the real agenda months ago.
Protest in the smartphone age
Written By: - Date published: 1:34 pm, June 2nd, 2012 - 31 comments
There’s a lot of analogy between how a guerrilla movement succeeds against a superpower or a state in the era of mass communication and how protest movements can do the same. Unable to win head-on, losing becomes winning as long as the cameras are rolling. It’s about being seen as having a legitimate cause and just as importantly being seen as the victims of disproportionate force and abuse of power.
Another shaming poverty report for the government to ignore
Written By: - Date published: 12:07 pm, May 31st, 2012 - 51 comments
Here’s a prediction for you – the Nats will ignore this report too. They’re not particularly interested in the issue of kids in poverty.
National’s war on the deficit – 2015
Written By: - Date published: 1:38 pm, May 30th, 2012 - 7 comments
Nats pay for booze for the elite, cut home insulation for families
Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, May 30th, 2012 - 33 comments
National blew the VIP entertainment budget for the Rugby World Cup by $5 million, despite none of the promised big names actually turning up. They got the extra dosh out of Mfat’s budget. In unrelated news, the government is cutting the Greens’ Warm Up New Zealand programme, which has returned four times its costs in benefits. There’s no money, you see.
Larger classes only for the peasants
Written By: - Date published: 7:01 am, May 30th, 2012 - 34 comments
So, half the Cabinet sends their kids to private schools. Those schools – which National has upped the taxpayers subsidies for – boast of small class sizes. Kings, where Key sends his kid, says: “Class sizes are limited and our policy of a low pupil-to-teacher ratio ensures students are given greater individual attention in the classroom”. Guess larger classes are only good for the peasants’ kids.
Who’s National looking out for?
Written By: - Date published: 7:22 am, May 29th, 2012 - 45 comments
We’re told that these are tough times and we all have to share in the pain. Yeah, right. National dug this hole with $2 billion in ‘fiscally neutral’ tax cuts, billions in subsidies to polluters, and white elephant motorways that aren’t worth what they cost. And who’s being made to bear the cost? The rich are doing well, while the poor and middle class go backwards.
Curing Tobacco
Written By: - Date published: 11:10 am, May 28th, 2012 - 125 comments
So tobacco is a ridiculously addictive drug that offers no accompanying high for the user. It has pretty dire health consequences and was promoted for years as harmless, chic and sophisticated and the government even gave it away to combatants during WWII by the carton load.
But now the government wants it gone.
Picking winners
Written By: - Date published: 10:11 am, May 28th, 2012 - 10 comments
National’s got this love affair with ‘outcomes, not outputs’. Means funding teachers and community groups on the achievements of their students or clients, not the number they have. You don’t have to have seen The Wire to know the results. Schools and community groups will pick winners, only those who can achieve easily, to protect their funding.
Stockholm syndrome
Written By: - Date published: 9:52 am, May 25th, 2012 - 22 comments
With enough conditioning, our psyches will adapt to believe almost anything. Like that pain is good.
Fail Budget
Written By: - Date published: 2:09 pm, May 24th, 2012 - 106 comments
Budget reaction here. Seems the Nats’ preferred budget tag line is ‘Investing in the future’. Should have called it ‘Waiting for Godot’. Here’s a quick summary: Zero = Fail.
Update: Nats planning to tax kids’ after school jobs. No, not joking.
McCarten: Waging war on working class
Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, May 22nd, 2012 - 11 comments
Matt McCarten’s latest column is a must read. There is something nasty going on…
Meatworkers win
Written By: - Date published: 7:21 am, May 22nd, 2012 - 38 comments
News in that Talley’s/AFFCO and the Meatworkers reached an agreement at 5am this morning. The workers will keep their wage and job security provisions and still be covered by a collective. The workers have displayed incredible strength with support from up and down the country. Next time, bosses will think twice before attacking their workers.
Minister pleased with anemic economy
Written By: - Date published: 7:57 am, May 18th, 2012 - 38 comments
You have to take your hat off to National’s spin doctors, coming up with the plausible-sounding nonsense line that low interest rates mean affordable housing isn’t needed. But it led to this- Phil Heatley: “we’re pleased that we’re managing the economy such that interest rates are so low”. Ten minutes earlier, Tony Alexander: “lower interest rates reflect the weakness of the economic outlook”.
I’d love to see wages drop
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 am, May 15th, 2012 - 125 comments
Remember when John Key said he’d love to see wages drop? Yep? How about when Bill English claimed our low wages were our competitive advantage. Uh-huh.
Well the changes they’re bringing in to undermine working Kiwis’ bargaining power will do exactly that.
Saveloy Soup! Anyone?
Written By: - Date published: 6:17 am, May 12th, 2012 - 58 comments
Seems as though Dicken’s Oliver character was an ungrateful little ingrate who actually had it pretty good, all things considered. Gruel has to beat left over savaloy water, no?
The real reason for the secret ballot law
Written By: - Date published: 7:35 am, May 11th, 2012 - 54 comments
The tories are all puffed up about finally getting their secret ballot law passed. It’s about freedom they say, they’re on the side of the working man.
Thing is it’s not. And they most certainly aren’t.
All in the game
Written By: - Date published: 10:10 am, May 9th, 2012 - 77 comments
Everyone’s leaped on the Nats’ contraceptives for benies bid to distract from banks.com. Guess I’ll jump in too. Capitalist morality goes: the world/God rewards the good, which is why capitalists are rich – so, the poor, like beneficiaries, must be morally bad – the world would be better without bad people. Eugenics has been and remains a logical endpoint of capitalist morality.
Talley’s cracking
Written By: - Date published: 6:51 am, May 4th, 2012 - 36 comments
It is a fundamental injustice of our society that one family, which already has more than it can ever need, can hold 1,300 families, who have very little, to ransom just to make a little more cash. But the union makes us working people strong. By standing together, the workers are beating Talley’s in the AFFCO lockout. Talley’s cracked. Wants half them back. The workers have said ‘all of us or none of us’.
Inter-generational theft
Written By: - Date published: 10:24 am, May 2nd, 2012 - 49 comments
Baby boomers strike again. In 1989, University fees for domestic students in New Zealand were less than $300. Moreover, for many students, 90% of that cost was met by the government through a fees grant. NZUSA has a very good history of fees in New Zealand. But I just want to say thank you to the baby boomer generation. […]
The lucky ticket
Written By: - Date published: 2:56 pm, April 24th, 2012 - 52 comments
By popular acclaim we’re putting this comment by rosy up as a Guest Post. Rosy describes success in life by analogy to winning various divisions of lotto…
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