The Greatest Crime In Human History?

Humanity's Fate In Criminal Hands: How many years would it take, I wonder, before the greatest criminal act of human history – the deliberate release of a genocidal virus – came to be regarded as the singular, terrible, but absolutely necessary, act which prevented an incorrigibly rapacious human species from cooking itself, and just about every other living thing on Planet Earth, to death?

IT WOULD BE the greatest crime in human history. The ravages of Genghis Khan’s armies; the anguish of the slave trade; Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”; Stalin’s purges; Hitler’s Holocaust; the combined death tolls of World Wars One and Two: all of these nightmares would pale in comparison. The great pandemics of history: the Black Death especially, which carried-off between a third and a half of the human communities it infected; might come closer. But, only in the Western Hemisphere has humankind ever experienced anything remotely like the crime I’m about to describe.

It is estimated that the human population of the Americas in the years immediately prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late Fifteenth Century stood, conservatively, at 30 million. By the time the microbes unleashed upon the indigenous peoples of North and South America by their European carriers had done their work, that figure had plummeted to less than 5 million. Within a century, Europe’s viral exports had reduced the human population of the Americas by between 80 and 90 percent.

So overwhelming was this sudden depopulation of the Americas that it ended up affecting the global climate. Human communities across the Americas had relied upon wood for heating and construction. Forest clearance was also necessary for the cultivation of crops. The sudden elimination of millions of human beings, leading to the disappearance of entire communities, led to the rapid advancement of forests across thousands of square miles on both continents. The increased sequestration of carbon which resulted from this natural process of reforestation lowered the level of atmospheric CO2 and triggered what became known as the “Little Ice Age” of the Seventeenth Century. Some scientists are even arguing that the sudden depopulation of the Americas marks the true beginning of the Anthropocene – the current geological age, in which human-beings are themselves responsible for generating planet-wide ecological change.

To the worst criminal in human history, the terrible fate of the indigenous peoples of the Americas would likely prove cruelly instructive. A highly contagious viral infection, against which human-beings possess absolutely no defence, is clearly capable of wiping out close to 100 percent of any population it infects. Assuming the motive for the world’s worst criminal is a determination to save the biosphere’s other life forms, the catastrophic depopulation of the America’s during the Sixteenth Century offers another lesson. Eliminating 80-90 percent of humanity at speed may be the only means of sequestering sufficient carbon to arrest the effects of anthropogenic global warming. Combined with the sudden cessation of virtually all industrial pollution, the unchecked growth of forests might just be enough to save the planet.

Who could do such a thing? Well, the criminal would have to be extremely wealthy. Rich enough to hire microbiologists sufficiently skilful to develop not only a humanity-winnowing virus, but the vaccine required to ensure that the “right” people survived it.

Some Silicon Valley billionaire with a God complex, perhaps? He might even have bought a huge chunk of New Zealand’s South Island high-country to hide in when the bodies start falling. It’s even possible that this genocidal billionaire might decide to turn New Zealand into a human ark: the place where humanity’s seed-corn can be kept safe for the moment when a terribly chastened, but indubitably wiser, “Humanity 2.0” can begin again.

How many years would it take, I wonder, before the greatest criminal act of human history – the deliberate release of a genocidal virus – came to be regarded as the singular, terrible, but absolutely necessary, act which prevented an incorrigibly rapacious human species from cooking itself, and just about every other living thing on Planet Earth, to death?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 28 February 2019.

How Big Is Your Army?

Prone To Failure: Proclaiming class war without a large force of armed citizens at your back is a very dangerous thing to do. Just ask Juan Guaido, Venezuela’s CIA-trained “Interim President”, how much luck he’s having overthrowing his country’s democratically-elected president without the support of either the Police or the Armed Forces.

POLICE NUMBERS just topped 13,000. Forty years ago there were fewer than half that number – considerably fewer. Astonishingly, we now have almost as many cops as we do soldiers. At last count the New Zealand Defence Force numbered 14,921. Put those numbers together and the state’s coercive potential turns out to be not far shy of 30,000 highly-trained and fearsomely-equipped men and women. Those who allow expressions like “revolution” and “class war” to trip so merrily off their tongues should be required to explain where their 30,000 highly-trained and fearsomely-equipped men and women are currently hiding – just waiting for the word.

Proclaiming class war without a large force of armed citizens at your back is a very dangerous thing to do. Just ask Juan Guaido, Venezuela’s CIA-trained “Interim President”, how much luck he’s having overthrowing his country’s democratically-elected president without the support of either the Police or the Armed Forces.

Guaido can call the Venezuelan middle-class on to the streets and encourage his far-right student supporters to throw stones at the riot cops, but so long as President Maduro’s police officers and soldiers remain loyal, Guaido’s coup d’état will remain a busted flush. In the aftermath of this past weekend’s concerted campaign to force open Venezuela’s borders with Columbia and Brazil, Guaido’s only real hope of success lies in the USA and its reactionary allies lending him some armed men and women of their own.

Holding back all that stock-piled US “aid” and preventing all those Venezuelan emigres from flooding into the country is, therefore, crucial to the survival of Maduro’s Chavista regime. If the borders are forced open, then the way will be clear for the US equivalent of Russia’s “little green men” to slip across and start doing to Venezuela what Vladimir Putin’s soldiers-in-mufti (fighting alongside local rebel groups) did in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. If you’ve been wondering why Maduro is going to such lengths to prevent the breaching of his country’s borders, then wonder no more.

Not that you’ll hear the scores of journalists dispatched to cover the “liberation” of Venezuela from its socialist “dictator” talk about any of this. There has, to date, been almost no coverage of the fact that neither the Red Cross nor the United Nations’ relief agencies will have a bar of Guaido’s “humanitarian” effort. Again and again these organisations have attempted to alert the Western media to the fact that by so thoroughly politicising the delivery of humanitarian aid, the US and its allies have betrayed their real (and far from humanitarian) agenda.

Had these journalists been sent to cover the Trojan War, they’d have loudly insisted that the citizens of Troy were morally obliged to haul the departing Greeks’ giant wooden horse inside the city walls. Twenty-four hours later, as Troy’s temples burned, and its inhabitants were put to the sword, these same journalists would invite the watching world to join them in celebrating the “restoration of Trojan democracy”.

Beware of Americans bearing gifts.

The story is very similar with France’s Gillets Jaune. In spite of weeks of at times violent confrontations with the French authorities, and thousands of arrests, the “Yellow Vests” are no closer to their goal of evicting President Emmanuel Macron from the Élysée Palace. Notwithstanding their profound distaste for the job they’ve been given, the French Police continue to obey the brutal orders of their political masters.

A revolution without arms does not remain a revolution for very long. Just ask the unfortunate Chileans who fell under the killer blows of General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. They may have elected Salvador Allende, a self-described Marxist, as their President. Their Popular Unity Coalition may have won election after election. But, as a democratic government, they were obliged to persuade the unconvinced half of the Chilean electorate that the revolutionary changes the Left was seeking were worthy of their support. Not to simply impose them regardless. This they did not do.

As Ariel Dorfman, a leading left-wing intellectual of the tumultuous Allende years, later recalled in his bitter-sweet autobiography, Heading South, Looking North:

“It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.”

Our own progressive coalition government could benefit hugely from reading Dorfman’s memoir. Proposing measures that cause a large number of voters “to fear for their safety and their future” is never a wise course of political action. And those who urge the government to simply ignore and/or roll over the top of the “greedy fucks” who raise objections to its policies should be required to answer the question which veteran left-wing organiser, Matt McCarten, always asks of those demanding revolution and class war:

“How big is your army?”

To be followed immediately by: “And will it defend your revolutionary cause with the ferocity of 13,000 police officers and 14,921 members of the New Zealand Defence Force fighting to protect the status-quo?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 26 February 2019.

Where Britain Goes With Huawei, We Can Go Too.

Where She Stands, We Stand: For reasons which would, undoubtedly, be very interesting to discover, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (above) and its National Cyber-Security Centre, have given the Chinese tech-giant, Huawei, a pass. Prime Minister Ardern now has the excuse she needs to step back from the brink of diplomatic and economic disaster, by instructing our own Government Communications Security Bureau to give a similar pass to Spark-Huawei’s interrupted 5G deal.

A WAY OUT of our deepening rift with China has opened up. Courtesy, remarkably, of the United Kingdom. Historically, it has been New Zealand which rushed to Britain’s rescue. This time, it’s the other way ‘round.

For reasons which would, undoubtedly, be very interesting to discover, the UK’s National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) has given the Chinese tech-giant, Huawei, a pass. Prime Minister Ardern now has the excuse she needs to step back from the brink of diplomatic and economic disaster, by instructing our own Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) to give a similar pass to Spark-Huawei’s interrupted 5G deal.

In doing so, the PM will need to step away from her ridiculous claim that she and her colleagues have no control over the ultimate fate of the Spark-Huawei 5G roll-out. For that proposition to be true, we would have to accept that a decision vital to this country’s economic future has been delegated to an unaccountable civil servant whose judgement will tie the hands of the democratically-elected government of New Zealand.

Fortunately, this is not the case. While the Director of the GCSB will conduct his enquiries and make his report, as legally required, the final decision must rest with the Minister in Charge of the GCSB and the SIS, Andrew Little. Which will, in turn, be guided by the deliberations of his Cabinet colleagues – as befits a parliamentary democracy.

The fiction that the Huawei decision was out of her hands was devised by the PM as a way of putting as much distance as possible between her Government and the problems that were bound to flow from such a gratuitous slap in the face of New Zealand’s largest trading partner. But now, thanks to the NCSC, we no longer have to tie ourselves up in such obviously bogus knots.

Our NCSC saviours have, however, left the PM with another question to answer: Why did the GCSB believe Huawei constituted such an existential threat to New Zealand’s national security in the first place?

The NCSC boffins have made it clear that any potential cyber-security threats can be relatively easily mitigated. The Financial Times, quotes Robert Hannigan, the former head of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), as saying that the NCSC “never found evidence of malicious Chinese state cyber activity through Huawei”. Suggestions that “any Chinese technology in any part of a 5G network represents an unacceptable risk are nonsense”, harrumphed Hannigan.

All of which suggests that the GCSB was taking its lead from other members of the Five Eyes Agreement – namely the United States, Canada and Australia. Additional domestic pressure may also have been applied by the fiercely pro-American NZ Defence Force, whose Minister, NZ First’s Ron Mark, has clearly swallowed a hefty draught of Washington’s anti-Chinese Kool Aid. Hardly surprising, really, given the vast quantities of the same beverage (notorious for inducing “Chinese threat” hallucinations) already imbibed by Mark’s boss, Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

Prime Minister Ardern needs no instruction when it comes to understanding the threat posed to the “international rules-based order” by President Donald Trump. It may, however, be time for her to reconsider her initial assessment of Canada’s Justin Trudeau. His handling of the Huawei issue has been nothing short of woeful. As for the Australians: their embarrassing lesson in the dangers of pre-emptive obsequiousness is one our PM would be wise to file away for future use.

From the very start, the co-ordinated condemnation of Huawei by the USA, Canada and Australia has been laced through with the most poisonous hypocrisy. The very notion of these Five Eyes powers identifying China’s high-tech companies as a major threat to the world’s cyber security is grotesque. No other combination of Western technological prowess has wreaked more havoc on the private communications of the worlds peoples. As Edward Snowden’s revelations made clear, the Five Eyes don’t just eavesdrop on their enemies, they listen-in on their friends as well!

We can only hope that the grown-ups at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade who have, for the past week, been working round-the-clock to haul this Government back from the brink of a catastrophic rupture with China, have also taken a moment to remind the Prime Minister that an “independent” foreign policy dictated by the Americans is almost as absurd as a foreign ministry overseen by Winston Peters.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 February 2019.

Dying In A Ditch For A Capital Gains Tax That Half The Country Doesn’t Want.

Why Is This Man Smiling? Is Sir Michael Cullen's Capital Gains Tax really worth this government dying in a ditch for? Especially if that means all hope of making progress on the issues ordinary Labour and Green voters really do care about will be lost. Even though it will allow the Right to come storming back to power on populist promises of saving the family batch and making it possible, once again, for hard-working Kiwis to cash-in their dreams.

THE LABOUR-GREEN TECHNOCRATIC LEFT is clearly preparing to die in the very same ditch in which the Right hopes to bury the proposed Capital Gains Tax (CGT). This is unfortunate, since one of the more annoying, if unintended, consequences of such folly is likely to be the fall of the Coalition Government. Assuming, of course, that Winston Peters and NZ First are willing to die alongside their Labour and Green comrades. The sheer improbability of that happening is really the only ray of hope illuminating what is otherwise a pretty dreary situation.

It is to be hoped that the partisans of a CGT are stockpiling their rhetorical and evidentiary weaponry with the same eager energy as the National Party, Act and the Taxpayers Union. This latter trio can barely contain their glee that Sir Michael Cullen and his Tax Working Group are preparing to gift them such a large consignment of political dynamite.

Presumably, the advocates of a CGT are confident that this dynamite will explode in the Right’s face. That a CGT, opposed (according to Reid Research) by 54 percent of voters, will nevertheless rouse the “Missing Million” voters from their slumbers and send them marching towards the barricades. Because, according to these same advocates, the CGT is about “fairness”, and fairness is as Kiwi as … umm … voting National and grumbling about tax.

Strangely enough, the Right’s campaign against the CGT will also be based on “fairness”. They will be arguing that it’s only fair that people who have worked hard all their lives to make a success of a farm, a small business, or a rental property, are entitled to be rewarded for all that effort and self-sacrifice by pocketing the capital gain – tax free.

Will the Right focus on the multi-millionaire who invests $10 million, walks away with $50 million, and pays not one cent of tax on his ill-gotten capital gains? Of course not! They’re relying on most New Zealanders not knowing anyone like that. The sort of people most Kiwis do know, however, is the couple who set up their own business, slogged their guts out, and then cashed it in for a tidy sum. Do most Kiwis begrudge these folk their windfall? Not at all. They know what it cost them to get it.

The Right is also betting that the Kiwi dream of becoming one’s own boss remains as strong as ever. At least as strong as any desire to stick it to the rich. That confidence is in no way misplaced since neither the Labour Party, nor the Greens, were willing to make “sticking it to the rich” a central plank of their respective election policy platforms.

Certainly, an invitation to come up with new and inventive ways to “stick it to the rich” formed no part of the Tax Working Group’s terms-of-reference. If it had, then I strongly suspect Sir Michael Cullen would have refused to serve!

In fact, if we think about them, those terms-of-reference were pretty damn lame. The Working Group was not permitted to consider increasing income tax on the very wealthy. They were prohibited from investigating a land tax, or recommending the re-introduction of inheritance tax. Even worse, it was soon made clear by Michael Cullen’s protégé, and Finance Minister, Mr Grant (Budget Responsibility Rules) Robertson, that any revenue raised from a “broad-based” CGT would have to be offset elsewhere in the fiscal system.

So much for the fond hopes of misguided progressives that the additional billions raised by a CGT would be used to fund desperately needed increases in social expenditure.

Nope. Labour and the Greens were having none of that. All they wanted was a CGT. Indeed, so badly did the Greens want it that their male co-leader, James Shaw, recently declared that they didn’t deserve to be re-elected if a CGT was not delivered.

Certainly, when it comes to causes for which activists are ready to endanger their party’s grip on power, the Labour-Green Technocratic Left’s determination to die in a ditch for a CGT is equalled only by the Alliance’s Left’s determination to die in a ditch over the USA’s post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan. There were many causes for which the Alliance Left might honourably have committed political suicide, but saving the Taliban wasn’t one of them!

The common factor here: what links the Labour-Green Technocratic Left with the old Alliance Left; is a peculiar kind of political tone-deafness. The suggestion that a Western political party eager to be re-elected should stand in the way of punishing those responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 should have sounded absurd in the ears of practical political activists. Similarly, the notion that the single most important change for which ordinary New Zealanders are clamouring is a CGT. Not effective action to eliminate poverty and homelessness; not immediate and drastic measures to combat climate change; not cleaning up our rivers and streams; or improving our mental health services. None of these things – judging by the lethargy and prevarications of this government and its technocratic supporters – are worth dying in a ditch for.

But a CGT is, apparently, deserving of the ultimate sacrifice. Even if it means that all hope of making progress on the issues ordinary Labour and Green voters really do care about will be lost. Even though it will allow the Right to come storming back to power on populist promises of saving the family batch and making it possible, once again, for hard-working Kiwis to cash-in their dreams.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 21 February 2019.

Is Corbyn Allowing Yesterday’s Enemies To Win Again?

The Ghost Of Futures Passed: Does Jeremy Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

JEREMY CORBYN’S fatal political error has been to look over his shoulder rather than over the horizon. As is so often the case with politicians who have had their party’s agenda wrenched from their hands by ideological rivals pursuing radically different goals, the temptation to start again from where they were forced to leave off is very strong. The 1980s Labour Party of Michael Foot and Tony Benn – the lodestars of Corbynism – was taken over and completely reshaped by Tony Blair in the 1990s. Rolling back Blairism and resuming Labour’s march towards democratic socialism has always been Corbyn’s mission. It was not, however, the mission imposed upon Labour by the relentless march of events. That, it turns out, is Brexit.

Corbyn has always been deeply conflicted by the evolution of the European project. Originally conceived as a means of preventing the powerful nations of Western Europe from ever again going to war with one another, the European Economic Community (EEC) had much to commend it. Its transformation, from the EEC into the European Union (EU), changed perceptions considerably. What began as an essentially social-democratic dream has morphed into what more and more leftists have come to regard as a neoliberal nightmare.

This trajectory (from social-democracy to neoliberalism) was, of course, mirrored in the domestic histories of practically all of the EU’s member states. Corbyn’s assessment, that a rejection of neoliberalism in the UK would be next-to-impossible if it remained an EU member, made him a very tepid advocate of his party’s official policy of encouraging Labour supporters to vote “Remain” in the 2016 Referendum. That so many of Labour’s heartland constituencies favoured the “Leave” option didn’t make things any easier.

Theresa May’s doomed attempt to increase the Conservative Party’s majority in the House of Commons by calling a snap-election in 2017, poured almost as much acid on the Leader of the Opposition as it did on the Prime Minister. Labour’s astonishing electoral performance was partly fuelled by its immensely popular “For the Many, Not the Few” manifesto, which, like Bernie Sander’s “democratic socialist” platform of the previous year, inspired and enthused tens-of-thousands of young, well-educated, but economically marginalised, voters. Mostly, however, Labour’s success was built on these younger voters’ conviction that Labour represented a forward-thinking alternative to the Tories’ reactionary “Little Englander” Brexiteers.

In the minds of the only voters that truly mattered – the ones who would spend most, if not all, of their lives in the Twenty-First Century – Labour stood for an open-hearted, multicultural and European future. If Labour wanted to endure as a viable political force (rather than a declining legacy party of Britain’s industrial past) then it had no choice but to make those young voters’ perceptions reality. Tragically, Corbyn was too mired in the politics of the Twentieth Century to rise to the challenge. Rather than lead the debate against Brexit; rather than mobilise his young supporters behind the call for a second referendum; Corbyn equivocated – and thereby surrendered the initiative.

What is currently unfolding in the UK is the direct consequence of Corbyn’s error.

Any politician who can count has worked out that for the Prime Minister to secure her “Brexit Deal” all she has to do is run down the clock to the point where the Labour Party – absolutely opposed to the UK “crashing-out” of the EU with no deal – is left with no alternative except to give May what she wants.

If Labour swings-in behind May’s deal, the Tory Brexiteers’ leverage instantly disappears. Would the humiliation of being outmanoeuvred by May and Corbyn cause the Brexit hardliners in the European Research Group to split the Tories? Of course! But the sheer intractability of the Brexit crisis has for some time indicated that some sort of break-up of the Conservative Party is unavoidable. It seems pretty clear that May accepts this. Willing to settle for the historical legacy of being the PM who fulfilled her “sacred duty” to take the UK out of the EU, May seems ready to ‘retire hurt’: limping, but with her head held high.

With the Conservative Government hopelessly divided, and May’s parliamentary majority in tatters, a new election becomes inevitable. Nothing could better please Jeremy Corbyn and his followers. With the Tories torn and bleeding, Labour would be swept to victory. Safely removed from the EU’s clutches, the battle against British neoliberalism could then begin in earnest.

This is the terrifying prospect that caused first the Labour Right, and then the Tory Left, to step forward as the vanguard of a new electoral force conceived to achieve two, brutally simple, strategic objectives. The first: To prevent, by any means necessary, Corbyn’s democratic-socialist Labour Party from taking power. The second: To secure, with all possible speed, the UK’s membership of, or re-admission to, the EU.

What the world is currently witnessing in the UK, is the “pre-emptive split” that simply has to happen if the looming, uncontrolled, disintegration of the British Right, and the left-wing victory such an unmediated break-up will permit, is to be circumvented.

As always, to save the Right, the Left has first to be rendered electorally harmless. Look, then, for the rise of a British version of Emanuel Macron’s “Le Republique En Marche” – a media-driven, City of London-funded, manifestation of the so-called “radical centre”.

It’s not as if such a re-alignment has never happened before. To get the UK through the Great Depression of the 1930s, without capitulating to the far-Right or the far-Left, required the formation of a “National Government” – led initially by the renegade Labour Leader, Ramsay MacDonald, but held up by the votes of the shires. The Labour Party proper was reduced to an impotent parliamentary rump. It required the massive social and economic upheavals of the Second World War to restore Labour to electoral competitiveness.

Clearly, there is still a great deal to do before this unfolding political re-alignment can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. What its organisers need most is time.

And time, strangely enough, is precisely what the EU leader, Donald Tusk, appears to be offering Theresa May. The last thing the EU’s German and French masters want to see is a securely entrenched democratic-socialist government unsettling the people of Europe from the other side of the English Channel. The EU looks set to give the UK’s political class all the time it needs to prevent such a dangerous development.

Does Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

In the end, Corbyn’s obsession with fighting yesterday’s battles may only make it easier for yesterday’s enemies to win again.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 24 February 2019.

Just Like “Rogernomics”, A Capital Gains Tax Would Traumatize The New Zealand Economy.

Pushing CGT Uphill: The prospect of collecting a tax-free capital gain at the end of a life of hard work and deferred gratification is what keeps “Middle New Zealand” going. The farmer, the small businessperson, the professional couple who diligently paid off their mortgage and then leveraged the freehold into a second property: these are the people whose undying enmity will destroy any party foolish enough to enact a CGT.

LATER THIS WEEK, the recommendations of the Tax Working Group will become public. It is highly likely that a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) of some description will be near the top of the Working Group’s “To Do” list. How should Labour handle this extremely hot potato? The tax which all the experts tell us we have to have has much to recommend it theoretically, but, in the bluntest of practical political terms, it could very easily destroy this government.

The most important aspect of the CGT issue, and the one the Coalition Government should keep in mind at all times, is that the expectation of capital gain is now “baked in” to the economic expectations of a huge number of New Zealanders. One might even say that it is the beating heart of this country’s economic culture. The prospect of collecting a tax-free capital gain at the end of a life of hard work and deferred gratification is what keeps “Middle New Zealand” going. The farmer, the small businessperson, the professional couple who diligently paid off their mortgage and then leveraged the freehold into a second property: these are the people whose undying enmity will destroy any party foolish enough to enact a CGT.

Only those who conceive of our society as some sort of mechanism could possibly advocate a CGT. These are the people who believe that with a just few judicious adjustments to the social mechanism everyone’s lives will be immeasurably improved. Doubters will find themselves wondering what all the fuss was about when they see how brilliantly the technical changes are working. Opponents should be ignored. They just don’t get it.

Anyone who lived through the “technical adjustments” of the Rogernomics era knows that this line of argument is complete and utter bollocks. The “short-term pain for long-term gain” mantra that was advanced by the Fourth Labour Government (and amplified to ear-drum rupturing levels by the news media) was a lie.

Very few of New Zealand’s social indices have registered a clear improvement in the lives of New Zealanders as a result of the so-called “Rogernomics Revolution”. The wage-earner’s share of company surpluses has reduced in comparison to the shareholder’s. The number of New Zealanders owning their own homes has declined sharply. The dramatic surge in average life expectancy that distinguished the 30 years following World War II has plateaued.

The explanation for New Zealand society’s resolute refusal to be improved by the Fourth Labour Government’s neoliberal “reforms” is very simple. Society is not a mechanism, it is an organism. Ripping things out from, or cutting them off, a living system doesn’t improve it. All that happens is that the system is left wounded and bleeding. Given sufficient time, an organism may adapt to the loss of a limb, or an organ. Wounds do heal. But attempting to pass off the maimed subject of your surgery as a vast improvement over what existed before, is a fool’s errand. Trauma endures.

Has this government, dominated as it is by the Labour Party, learned anything from what happened between 1984 and 1999?

If it politely receives the Tax Working Group’s recommendations, only to consign them, quietly, to the archives, then we may be confident that Labour has absorbed the lessons of its recent history. If, however, Labour presses ahead: proclaiming, once again, the mighty improvements that are bound to follow the suggested adjustments to the mechanism; then we must anticipate the same disastrous consequences.

What farmer (who is not a corporation) will persist with the heartbreak and stress of extracting value from the land, if the tax-free reward awaiting him at the end of his stewardship is transformed into a crippling tax bill?

Will the small-business owner be content to pay herself less than the staff she employs; will she continue to pour her blood, sweat and tears into her enterprise; if a third of the capital gain she hopes to realise at the time of its eventual sale is payable to the IRD?

Will the professional couple with some capital to invest continue to put it into a rental property if a CGT is introduced? Will they go on putting-up with the often appalling behaviour of delinquent tenants? Will they continue to spend a small fortune keeping their properties warm and watertight? They might as well put all their savings into KiwiSaver.

Which is, of course, exactly what the economists want them to do. But will KiwiSaver rent out properties to students? Will it give young tradespeople somewhere decent to live while they amass the capital resources necessary to fulfill the Kiwi Dream of becoming one’s own boss?

Money flows around the social organism we call New Zealand in a unique way. We are not Germany, with its hugely facilitative regional banking structures and its comprehensive tenant protections. Nor are we the USA, with its vast domestic market and its middle-class households’ longstanding propensity to invest in stocks and shares. Ours is an economy driven by delayed gratification: by putting in the hard yards now, on the promise of tax-free capital gains later. Rip that expectation away from aspirational Kiwis, and the economic organism will suffer yet another massive trauma.

Those responsible for inflicting a Capital Gains Tax on New Zealand should not expect to be re-elected for a generation – at least.

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Tuesday, 19 February 2019.

Political Sadism, Or Moral Inertia? Explaining David Clark.

Whadaryah? It is hard to believe that Health Minister, David Clark, could have gratuitously refrained from speaking out against the latest decision of the Waikato DHB. So egregious has been the Board’s treatment of Dave Macpherson, Jane Stevens and their family, that the thought of Clark personally endorsing its conduct is repellent.

CLEARLY, DAVID CLARK never got the “Politics of Kindness” memo. In the face of the appalling behaviour of this country’s District Health Boards, the current Minister of Health’s deafening silence is proof of either political sadism or moral inertia. Neither option is acceptable in a government so loudly committed to the “well-being” of its citizens.

It is hard to believe that Clark could have gratuitously refrained from speaking out against the latest decision of the Waikato DHB. So egregious has been the Board’s treatment of Dave Macpherson, Jane Stevens and their family, that the thought of Clark personally endorsing its conduct is repellent.

That said, any decent Health Minister would have picked up the phone the moment he discovered what the DHB was trying to do, and instructed its CEO to cease and desist immediately. Dave and Jane, having been vindicated by the Coroner, deserved much better of the Waikato health bureaucracy than this reprehensible attempt to have the whole inquest re-staged. Not content with contributing to the death of Nicky Stevens, Dave and Jane’s deeply troubled son, the Board seems intent upon recommencing the slow torture of his parents.

So, if Clark isn’t a vicious political sadist, then what is he?

The answer, presumably, is that Clark is yet another of those all-too-familiar neoliberal heroes – the politician who has trained himself to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak only when advised that it is “appropriate” to do so. Like the hapless participants in Dr Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment, Clark keeps dialling-up the pain. Never questioning the moral probity of those issuing the instructions. The Waikato DHB’s insurance company wants Dave and Jane put back on the rack? Well then, the Minister must not, under any circumstances, intervene.

It would be nice to think that Clark: an indisputably well-educated man; a member of the Labour Party; and – may God forgive him – a self-confessed Christian! might have demonstrated the moral courage of those participants in the Milgram Experiment who stood up to the men in the white coats. The ones who said “No.” Who flatly refused to participate in a process that, as far as they knew, was inflicting ever-more-dangerous electric shocks to the errant subjects screaming in an adjoining room.

Sadly, Clark’s refusal to address the bad behaviour of a single DHB, acting on its own, is more than matched by his failure to rein-in the Boards’ collective aggression towards their own staff.

There was a time when Labour Party ministers came from backgrounds where strike action, and the solidarity that makes striking possible, were the stuff of personal experience. A Health Minister with that sort of heritage would instantly recognise the DHBs’ negotiators’ current tactics vis-à-vis the Resident Doctors Association. He would see them for what they are: a deliberate attempt to run down the clock, so that the scab MECA (multi-employer collective agreement) negotiated by SToNZ will, on 1 March, become the only agreement available to junior doctors.

An “old school” Labour cabinet minister, one who’d held a union card, would have put a stop to such scabrous tactics. Clark’s behaviour, however, suggests that his most formative professional years were the ones he spent working for Treasury. Certainly, it’s the Treasury way to prioritise “fiscal responsibility” over anything as subjective as the young doctors’ commitment to offering the best possible care to their patients. Care that can only be compromised by being forced to work 12 days straight without a break.

Unfortunately, “fiscal responsibility” has been so fetishized by this government that Clark felt morally justified in telling the DHBs that they must operate strictly within the unrealistically tight budgets imposed on them by himself and Finance Minister Robertson. The Coalition’s “Budget Responsibility Rules” are not for breaking; which is clearly being interpreted by the DHBs’ negotiators to mean – the  junior doctors’ union is.

Is this the behaviour of a Minister of Health inspired by the “politics of kindness”? Are these budgetary constraints intended to foster the nation’s “well-being”? Not really. They are, however, entirely consistent with the neoliberal assumptions which continue to underpin the New Zealand Labour Party’s political behaviour.

The most important of these continues to be the assumption that only bad things can come from the “politicisation of economics”. Ministers must be directed by the numbers – and only the numbers. The human heart is a poor guide to rational administration. Patient care, and the care of patients, is to be defined by the data – nothing else.

David Clark does not appear to have a metric for moral force. The calculation of our health system’s ethical obligations seems beyond him. How, when all is said and done, does one measure a family’s sorrow, or calculate a young doctor’s dedication?

What is the market-price of kindness?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 15 February 2019.

Mixed Messages.

Incoming Calls: While Prime Minister Ardern is contemplating the ever-widening ramifications of the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s  reckless endangerment of so many of this country’s longstanding diplomatic, military and trade relationships, she might also consider asking herself how New Zealand’s refusal to distance itself from such naked assertions of ‘hard power’ is likely to impact on China – the nation which just happens to take 26 percent of our exports?

IF JACINDA can tear herself away from Reid Research’s latest poll, she might like to cast an eye over the UK Defence Secretary’s, Gavin Williamson’s, recent speech to the Royal United Services Institute. Dismissed by The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins as “the pompous rantings of a 1950s Tory on the make”, Williamson’s words recall the long dead era of British naval supremacy, as well, sadly, as the rapacious imperialistic appetites it excited.

His country’s imminent departure from the European Union, Williamson declared, should be seen as a heaven-sent opportunity to re-define the United Kingdom’s role as a global power: “Brexit has brought us to a great moment in our history. A moment when we must strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality and increase our mass.”

Simon Jenkin’s insults notwithstanding, Williamson’s speech was more than a mere “rant”. He actually proposes to send the UK’s newest aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth II, along with her squadron of F-35 fighter jets, into the Pacific. This dramatic projection of British “hard power” will, according to the Defence Secretary, serve notice on all those who “flout international law” that the “Anglosphere” is back in its old hunting-grounds – and means business.

Williamson’s reference to the flouters of international law is, of course, aimed directly at China. By the “Anglosphere” he presumably means the “White” British Empire of yesteryear: Canada, Australia and New Zealand – plus, of course, the USA. Quite what the Chinese, Indians, and all the other peoples of Asia (which Williamson, tellingly, refers to as the “Indo-Pacific region”) are supposed to make of this altogether outlandish resurgence of Anglo-Saxon imperialism is anybody guess, but it is unlikely to be positive.

The question Jacinda needs to ask herself, her Labour colleagues, and her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, especially, is: How should New Zealand respond to Williamson?

Is our Prime Minister really willing to allow this country to be associated with such an extraordinary display of racial and cultural chauvinism – and sabre-rattling? Should she not instead move immediately to distance herself from this latest example of Brexit-induced English lunacy?

And while she’s contemplating the ever-widening ramifications of the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s reckless endangerment of so many of this country’s longstanding diplomatic, military and trade relationships, she might also consider asking herself how New Zealand’s refusal to distance itself from such naked assertions of ‘hard power’ is likely to impact on China – the nation which just happens to take 26 percent of our exports?

It is to be hoped that our Prime Minister is sufficiently historically literate to recognise the scarcely believable levels of hypocrisy on display in Williamson’s grand rhetorical flourishes upbraiding those who flout international law. The UK is, after all, the nation whose warships forced the Chinese to open their ports to the East India Company’s opium.

When a British Secretary of Defence talks about enhancing the Royal Navy’s “lethality”, the chords of memory struck in the hearts of a billion Chinese evoke anger and sorrow in equal measure.

In relation to New Zealand, however, the reaction of the Chinese government is almost certain to be more sorrowful than angry. Since December 1972, New Zealand has enjoyed a special place in the hearts of the Chinese people.

Ours is not a powerful nation in conventional terms. Geographically and demographically, New Zealand is insignificant. Morally, however, we have loomed large in Chinese eyes. Proud and independent; determined to chart our own course, New Zealanders have, until quite recently, left behind them in Beijing a very favourable impression. The reward for that Kiwi honesty and fortitude was the 2008 China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement – without which our experience of the Global Financial Crisis would have been considerably less tolerable.

Right now, however, Beijing is wondering where that Kiwi honesty and fortitude has gone. Thanks to our Foreign Minister’s embrace of the Anglo-Saxon “Pacific Reset”, the delicate vase that was the China-New Zealand relationship lies in pieces on the ground.

Turning around airliners and “rescheduling” important diplomatic encounters is only the beginning. The Chinese have 5,000 years’ experience in sending “messages”.

If Jacinda was to send a message of her own, however. If she was to call out the UK Defence Secretary’s speech for what it is: imperialistic, racist and absurd; then Beijing might conclude, with relief, that New Zealand has returned to its senses.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 February 2019.

Commentary Is Free – But Facts Are Sacred.

Toeing The Party Line: On the subject of Venezuela, at least, right-wing commentators seem content to pack as much “fake news” around their ideological prejudices as possible, confident that their position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon them in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

POLITICAL COMMENTATORS tell us a great deal about themselves when they turn their gaze away from home, and towards events unfolding overseas. Domestic politics inevitably presents a rather muddied picture. There is so much happening: so many players – all with competing agendas – that achieving clarity is extremely difficult. With events overseas, however, there is much less in the way of clutter. The issues seem so clear, and the players so compelling, that the temptation to apply only the brightest primary colours to one’s analytical canvas is very hard to resist. Muted palettes are best reserved for the politics of one’s own homeland.

The commentary currently being offered up to New Zealand readers on the crisis playing-out in Venezuela strongly confirms these observations. And nowhere is the tendency to apply the brightest colours with the broadest brushstrokes more in evidence than in the commentaries of Liam Hehir.

Hehir is a conservative writer: vehemently and unrelentingly hostile to all things socialist. Hardly surprising, then, that Venezuela and its United Socialist Party government extract from him the most unequivocal political judgements.

As far as Hehir is concerned, the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is a “dictator”, and the election which returned him to power was corruptly “rigged”. What a contrast with the self-proclaimed “Interim President” of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Described by Hehir as “social-democratic”, this telegenic young man is said to have acted heroically and in complete accordance with his country’s constitution. Hehir is equally certain that the United States has played no dishonourable part in these events. Its only sin: placing itself at the side of the heroic Señor Guaido and the oppressed Venezuelan masses.

Unfortunately for Hehir, none of the above is true.

President Maduro was re-elected in an election certified by international observers as both free and fair. This is hardly surprising, since Venezuela has one of the most tamper-proof electoral systems in the world. That Maduro’s right-wing opponents, young Mr Guaido among them, opted to boycott the last presidential election in no way invalidates the process. Rather, it confirms the opposition parties’ profound political demoralisation, after seeing their candidates soundly defeated in every presidential election since 1999.

Nor is it even remotely true to say that Guaido acted in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution. Article 233, the constitutional provision cited by Hehir and the American government (from which Hehir appears to source all his information) was written to cover the situation in which the President Elect either resigns, is incapacitated, or dies prior to being sworn into office, and there is no formally acknowledged Vice-President available to take his/her place. These are the only circumstances in which the National Assembly is empowered to appoint an Interim President.

Given that Venezuela’s president was officially declared elected and formally sworn into office – along with his vice-president – on 10 January 2019, there is absolutely no legal justification for Guaido’s actions. This is confirmed by Alfred de Zayas, an American lawyer, writer, historian, expert in the field of human rights and international law and retired high-ranking United Nations official, who tweeted on 6 February: “Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution is inapplicable and cannot be twisted into legitimizing Guaido’s self-proclamation as interim President. A coup is a coup.”

Nor is it even remotely true that Guaido is some sort of benign social-democrat poised to resurrect his country’s mixed, if currently broken, economy. The real Juan Guaido is a far-right activist who has engaged in violent protests against the Venezuelan Government for the past five years. The party he belongs to, Popular Will, scorns the democratic process – preferring direct and highly aggressive action in the streets. Notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) its insurrectionary praxis, Popular Will enjoys the fulsome support of the US national security apparatus. (That Popular Will was permitted  to affiliate itself to the “Socialist International”, of whose youth wing our very own Jacinda Ardern was once the president, speaks volumes about the authenticity of the SI’s allegiance to social-democracy – let alone socialism!)

All of this information (and much, much more) is readily available on the Internet. That Hehir has consistently declined to adequately test his bald right-wing assertions about Venezuela; that he relies, instead, on the propaganda pouring out of the United States government and its news media “assets”; tells us a great deal about his approach to political journalism.

On the subject of Venezuela, at least, he seems content to pack as much “fake news” around his ideological prejudices as possible, confident that his position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon him in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

It is, of course, much more difficult to get away with this sort of “journalism” domestically. New Zealand is just too small for Hehir’s lurid misrepresentations of Venezuelan politics to be replicated in his commentaries on Kiwi current affairs.

A truly sobering question remains, however: If political conditions in this country ever deteriorated to the point where journalists were not only permitted, but encouraged, to pack fake news around their own and their publishers’ prejudices, would Liam Hehir’s commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in New Zealand be as strong as his commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in Venezuela?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 February 2019.

Harrowing Statistics: The Left’s Supposed To Shrink The Social Hell Of Joblessness – Not Expand It.

The Politics Of Kindness?  Such work as young workers are able to get tends to be indifferently rewarded and undertaken in conditions of considerable precariousness. Even those with impressive tertiary credentials struggle. Those without credentials find themselves consigned to social limbo. A  living purgatory, inhabited by persons of no economic value beyond that of holding down the wages of the working poor.

THE RISE in the unemployment rate, from 3.9 to 4.3 percent, may not sound like a lot – but it is. Not only because it represents a further 10,000 New Zealanders officially without work, but also because it’s the sort of news no genuine progressive government ever wants to hear. If progressive government is about anything, then it’s first and foremost about constantly expanding the number of citizens in good jobs with good pay. Any progressive government confronted with a steadily rising tide of joblessness should expect to drown.

Nor is it simply the raw percentage figure of 4.3 percent confronting the Coalition Government. Much more significant is the concomitant rise in the number of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs). This number now stands at just under 100,000 15-24 year-olds, or 14 percent. A record quarterly rise.

The picture painted by these statistics is not a pretty one. It shows a country in which secure, well-remunerated employment is fast becoming (if it has not already become) the preserve of people over forty. Not only that, but a labour market which has effectively become “grandfathered”.

There is an ever-decreasing layer of the workforce which enjoys good money and good employment contracts – and will go on enjoying them until retirement. For the rest of the workforce, however, simply growing older and more experienced no longer guarantees better pay and conditions. That particular conveyor belt: the one which their predecessors in the workforce rode to a secure prosperity, has been dismantled.

Such work as these younger generations of workers are able to get tends to be indifferently rewarded and undertaken in conditions of considerable precariousness. Even those with impressive tertiary credentials struggle. Those without credentials – the NEETs mentioned above – find themselves consigned to social limbo. A place of living purgatory, inhabited by persons of no economic value beyond that of holding down the wages of the working poor. Those who have not become criminals, addicts or mentally unwell, float like ghosts through a society which has been taught not to see them – because they are not real.

There is absolutely no long-term future for a progressive government which allows this state of affairs to persist. The joyful and unanticipated resurrection of the Left and its ascension into government – which forms the core of Jacinda’s redemptive political narrative – has unmistakeable echoes of the “Harrowing of Hell”. This is the religious tradition that has Christ, in the period between his crucifixion and resurrection, “descending into Hell”. According to the tale, the Son of Man prevails against the Gates of Hell, overcomes its infernal defenders, frees the imprisoned souls, and leads them into the light.

Nothing less is expected of progressive governments. Those locked-up in the social hell of joblessness, mental illness, addiction and economic impotence are supposed to be the very first item on the Left’s “to-do” list. The infernal defenders of Capitalism are supposed to be confronted and defeated, and the imprisoned ones uplifted into the dignity of labour. Only then can the Left’s resurrection be considered genuine.

In the most prosaic political terms, it means that the number of people out of work; and most assuredly, the number of NEETs; must fall – and fall decisively – if the Left is to rise, and stay risen.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 February 2019.

Socialist Rhetoric No Substitute For Socialist Substance.

Wrong Sort Of Soldier: America has no real objections to military officers, like Hugo Chavez (above) meddling in politics. Indeed, if the history of the last 100 years teaches us anything it’s that the US rather prefers military to civilian rule in Latin America. What “El Norte” does insist upon, however, is that the military officers in question be staunch supporters of the United States and the capitalist status quo – in that order.

VENEZUELA is not a socialist state. Under its beleaguered president, Nicolas Maduro, the private sector controls a larger percentage of the Venezuelan economy than the British private sector managed under Margaret Thatcher. Venezuela’s principal income earner, Petroleos de Venezeula S.A. (PDVSA) is, like Norway’s Statoil, publicly owned. It was not, however, nationalised by Maduro, nor by his charismatic predecessor, Hugo Chavez. PDVSA was set up 43 years ago by the social-democratic administration of President Carlos Andres Perez. In 1976, Chavez was just 22 years old; a politically invisible army officer, only recently graduated from the Venezuelan military academy.

No less a genuine socialist than the late Fidel Castro, well aware of the consequences of attempting to establish socialism in the Western Hemisphere, is on record as warning his Venezuelan comrades against over-indulging in fiery left-wing rhetoric at the expense of achieving substantive improvements in the economic and social performance of the nation. Maduro and his United Socialist Party are now paying a very high price for their failure to heed Castro’s advice.

Life was easy for Chavez and Maduro when the price of oil was high. Massive transfer payments to Venezuela’s poorest citizens brought them immediate and impressive relief. The “Bolivarian Revolution”, as Chavez liked to call his redistributive efforts (after Simon Bolivar, the heroic liberator of South America from the Spanish Empire) seemed to be as successful as it was effortless.

Until, suddenly, the price of oil collapsed.

Only then did Maduro grasp just how big a mistake he and his United Socialists had made. Economies like Venezuela’s all-too-easily become the victims of their own good fortune. The massive export revenues derived from a valuable commodity like oil strengthen the national currency to the point where it becomes virtually impossible for local producers to compete with the cheap imports pouring into the country. All well and good while the currency remains strong. Not so great, however, when plummeting export prices undermine the currency’s value and send the prices of imports rocketing skyward.

It was Maduro’s attempt to fix the exchange rate of Venezuela’s currency that proved his undoing. His political enemies very rapidly learned how to game the President’s hastily improvised currency and price controls. Inflation, which had been set to rise sharply as the price of imports soared, was super-charged by the debilitating economic impacts of Venezuela’s burgeoning black markets.

And all of this, remember, was happening in a political climate characterised by uncompromising class conflict. Not, as the enemies of Maduro and his United Socialists would have you believe, a struggle inaugurated from below, but from above. Chavez’s democratic mobilisation of the urban poor against the entrenched political power of the Venezuelan elites earned him their instant, bitter, and undying hatred. From the moment he was sworn in as President, the wealthiest layers of Venezuelan society have done everything within their power to drive him and his Bolivarian “revolutionaries” from office.

In this enterprise they have been able to rely on the constant and massive support of the United States. America has no real objections to military officers, like Hugo Chavez, meddling in politics. Indeed, if the history of the last 100 years teaches us anything it’s that the US rather prefers military to civilian rule in Latin America. What “El Norte” does insist upon, however, is that the military officers in question be staunch supporters of the United States and the capitalist status quo – in that order. It took Soviet nukes to keep Cuba’s left-wing Comandantes, Fidel and Che, from falling victim to American imperialism. Whether Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation can do the same for Maduro and his comrades remains to be seen.

Not that Maduro’s fate is likely to be decided by nukes. Back in the early 1970s, when the US was confronted with another democratically-elected socialist president, Chile’s Salvador Allende, the then US President, Richard Nixon’s, advisers told him to make the Chilean economy “scream”. It worked then, and it’s working now.

The demise of the Chavez/Maduro Bolivarian Revolution will be the consequence not of too much socialism, but too little. Combine a commodity-based capitalist economy with a left-wing government too inept to transform it from a vulnerable price-taker into a resilient price-maker, and the outcome is all-too-easy to predict.

Socialist rhetoric, without socialist substance, produces both the sweetest poetry – and the bitterest disappointment.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 February 2019.

The Incredible Lightness of Being Green.

Putting The Blue Into Green: The party’s male co-leader, James Shaw, openly touts for the support of “green” capitalists: as if the profits to be extracted from re-branding corporate greed as an “ecologically sustainable business ethos” will somehow render its actual production less dependent on environmental despoliation and unrelenting human exploitation.

IF IT’S PERMISSABLE to talk about “Red-Greens”, then why not about “Blue-Greens”? Surely an abiding concern for the natural environment is something which transcends narrow ideological considerations? And, if that’s true, doesn’t it make perfect sense for an environmental party to position itself squarely in the middle of the political spectrum – from whence it can reach out to both the Left and the Right?

Certainly, that’s what Vernon Tava believes, and the former Green MP, Kennedy Graham, agrees with him. In fact, Graham goes further, arguing that contemporary politics is driven by the followers of three great quests. The quest for freedom; the quest for equality; and the quest for sustainability. Graham strongly implies that the greatest of these three is sustainability. Without a sustainable environment, the quests for freedom and equality cannot succeed. This was the sort of thinking that prompted the late Rod Donald to declare: “The Greens are not of the Left. The Greens are not of the Right. The Greens are out in front.”

A great soundbite – but is it true?

It all depends what you mean by “out in front”. If it is intended to describe the vanguard role played by environmental activists in the 1970s and 80s, then the quip has some merit. Up until then “development” was the dominant – and largely uncontested – paradigm, embraced alike by the Capitalist West and the Communist Bloc. The power of science and technology was being unleashed against an intransigent natural world. “Progress” was the word used by both the Left and the Right to describe humankind’s heroic mission to bend Nature to its will. Felling forests, damming rivers and levelling mountains were all achievements to celebrate. Humankind was winning!

It took the Astronaut’s photograph of “Spaceship Earth” to jolt humanity into the realisation that this bright blue planet is all we have – a dazzling repository of life and beauty in an otherwise barren universe. Not an enemy to be subdued, but our one and only home. If there was a foe to be fought, then surely it was rampant industrialism and the insatiable consumerist societies it was spawning? Whether these societies were ruled by Capitalists, or Communists, hardly seemed to matter. The damage inflicted on the planet’s fragile ecosystems by both ideologies was equally catastrophic.

So, yes. Those who grasped the full social, economic and ecological consequences of the development paradigm were, indeed, “out in front” politically.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is possible to view the Cold War stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union as a conflict driven less by ideology than straightforward geopolitical rivalry. The Russians’ state-capitalist system, at enormous cost, was able to maintain a rough military parity with its corporate-capitalist competitors, but was completely outclassed in virtually all other aspects of production. The Russians never mastered the problems of distribution, and, crucially, suffered from a crippling shortage of domestically generated investment capital. The wonder is not that the Soviet Union fell, but that it remained upright for so long!

With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (a.k.a Capitalism!) the Greens’ boast that they were “out in front” lost its sting. The imperatives of corporate capitalism were now driving economic activity across the entire planet. Industrialisation and consumerism were being supercharged – and so was their impact on global ecosystems. Those who stood for the planet were now obliged to stand against a capitalist system whose corporate masters refused to acknowledge (and were, in fact, operating beyond) the moral and political claims of the traditional nation state.

But, as more and more of Earth’s burgeoning human population were swallowed up in the capitalist machine, the amount of CO2 spewing forth from its smokestacks and exhaust pipes was increasing exponentially – soaring towards an atmospheric concentration incompatible with the long-term survival of industrial civilisation. Capitalism was facing its final and fatal contradiction: a negation which only its own negation could negate.

The colour of this capitalist death-machine is, and always has been, blue. Calling yourself a “Blue-Green” is, therefore, oxymoronic. You can no more be a “Blue-Green” than you can be a non-violent boxer or a chaste debauchee. Nor is it defensible to describe yourself as a “Green-Green” – as if rescuing the biosphere can be accomplished without confronting directly the economic system responsible for its devastation. In this regard, the subjective sincerity or insincerity of Vernon Tava and Kennedy Graham is completely irrelevant. Objectively, they are serving the interests of the planet’s enemies – not its friends.

The capitalists’ oft-repeated accusation that they are facing “Red-Greens” is, however, entirely justified. If by “red” is meant a force dedicated to overturning the prevailing capitalist system and replacing it with one in which the three great goals of freedom, equality and sustainability will each become the indispensable guarantor of the other.

From their first appearance in the 1980s, Green parties around the world have presented themselves as both the exemplars and advocates of four foundational principles: Ecological Wisdom; Social Justice; Participatory Democracy; and Nonviolence. Each of these principles is antithetical to the founding principles of Capitalism: The Subjugation of Nature; Human Exploitation; Plutocracy; and Coercive Violence. The dilemma confronting Green supporters in New Zealand in 2019 is just how far the Green Party has drifted from the global Green Movement’s original values. There is a widespread and growing feeling that the Greens’ parliamentary representatives are no longer Capitalism’s enemies, but its enablers.

The party’s male co-leader, James Shaw, openly touts for the support of “green” capitalists: as if the profits to be extracted from re-branding corporate greed as an “ecologically sustainable business ethos” will somehow render its actual production less dependent on environmental despoliation and unrelenting human exploitation.

Only if Green voters are willing to subscribe to the fiction of “weightless” capitalist enterprises that leave no “carbon footprint”, can Shaw’s pitch be rendered credible. Except that, the cellphone in his pocket, the lap-top in his shoulder-bag, both argue against his proposition. If Shaw could only see the horrors attendant upon the extraction of the minerals that make them work; the super-exploitative megafactories in which they are assembled; then he would understand just how crushing the planetary burden off-loaded by his new-found “green” capitalist friends truly is.

As for the Greens’ female co-leader, Marama Davidson. Perhaps the best that can be said of her performance is that it has been distinguished by neither wisdom, nor justice. Nor even by a conspicuous quantum to democracy – participatory or otherwise. Most notably absent has been the founding Green principle of Nonviolence. On the contrary, Davidson’s “woke” faction of the party, caught up in the ever-tightening coils of identity politics, have unleashed a level of emotional violence upon those it deems ideological heretics that must surely make the party’s founders weep.

How different is today’s Green caucus from the “magnificent seven” Green MPs who entered the House of Representatives so triumphantly in 1999. The New Zealand establishment recognised those Greens for what they were: enemies of the status-quo and certainly not the sort of people this country’s capitalists (not even those in the Labour Party!) felt the least bit comfortable about doing business with. Red-Greens they were called: a label which MPs Sue Bradford and Keith Locke wore with pride. Today, to be branded a Red is simply embarrassing: proof only of outdated thinking.

Even so, the National Party leader, Simon Bridges’, enthusiasm for Vernon Tava’s “Blue-Green” initiative is misplaced. Such an obvious example of right-wing “astroturfing” would produce little of electoral value. Besides, all of the time, effort and resources required to draw off enough votes to tip the Greens out of Parliament would, ultimately, be politically counter-productive. New Zealand Capitalism is much better served by leaving the existing Green Party exactly where it is.

Sitting comfortably in the boardroom: sporting a pale-green silk tie and wearing a dark blue suit.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 February 2019.

Hands Off Venezuela!

People Power: The United States and its "assets" in the New Zealand news media, would like us to believe that all those protesting against Maduro’s inept handling of the unceasing political and economic crises by which he has been beset are unanimously for the self-declared "Iterim President", Juan Guaido. They are not. Many are seeking new elections and new leaders. But, they are not seeking a restoration of elite power. Nor will they countenance an American invasion of their homeland.

VENEZUELA DESERVES DEMOCRACY, but that is not what Venezuela is going to get. What it will get – as the whole world is currently witnessing – is a brutal assault on its people by the world’s most powerful nation. Venezuela is being threatened with economic strangulation, civil war and, should these stratagems prove ineffective in dislodging the government of President Nicolas Maduro, a full-scale military invasion led by the United States itself.

That such an invasion would constitute a flagrant violation of the United Nations’ Charter will count for nought. The world stood by and did nothing in 2003 when the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia violated the UN charter by invading Iraq – a country whose armed forces had not committed the slightest act of aggression against the belligerent powers, or any other UN member state.

The New Zealand Government, regardless of its private misgivings, will remain silent and inactive as the Venezuelan people are tortured into submission by the United States and its allies. To follow any other course of action would attract the attention of the very forces who have fastened Venezuela to the rack. Not wishing to be hit with US sanctions; unwilling to risk the seizure New Zealand’s overseas assets; Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters will keep their mouths shut and their heads down.

If they’re lucky.  Because a shameful silence is about the best we can hope for from the Coalition Government. If we are unlucky, the murderous thugs who are currently managing the subjugation of Venezuela will decide that New Zealand keeping its head down is insufficiently supportive of US policy. In these circumstances, Jacinda and Winston will be required to publicly endorse the Trump Administration’s excesses. Lest silence be misinterpreted by the rest of the world as disapproval or, God forbid! – defiance.

Regardless of Washington’s ultimate directive to its “very, very, very good friends” in New Zealand, the Coalition Government will be beset by a chorus of right-wing voices demanding that New Zealand recognise immediately the self-proclaimed “Interim President”, Juan Guaido, as Venezuela’s legitimate head-of-state. This pressure from the Right will only intensify as, one after the other, the USA’s closest allies abandon Maduro in favour of Guaido. That recognising this puppet politician will make New Zealand complicit in a US-backed coup d’état will in no way deter the Right from testing the Coalition Government’s “commitment to democracy”.

To facilitate just such an outcome, the Right has, for several weeks, been waging a co-ordinated campaign against the current Venezuelan Government, along with the “Bolivarian Revolution” championed by Maduro’s charismatic predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Right-wing commentators, led by Liam Hehir, have characterised the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of world oil prices; intensified by the economic sabotage perpetrated by Venezuela’s capitalist class; and aided immeasurably by the constricting effects of US sanctions and asset seizures; as evidence of the inevitable fate of any nation foolish enough to embrace socialism.

In eerie anticipation of the United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo’s, invitation for governments to “pick a side”, in this looming fight, Hehir has publicly demanded that all those left-wing commentators (myself included) who have, in the past, proclaimed their support for and/or admiration of Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution, must immediately recant their criminal folly and join with the Right in demonizing  Maduro, Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism, and all its works.

Hehir does not appear to be the least bit ashamed of his embrace of the very worst tactics of 1950s McCarthyism. One almost expects him to demand of all those unwilling to endorse the overthrow of a sovereign government: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

Significantly, Hehir is either ignorant of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the fact that the private sector’s share of the Venezuelan economy has actually grown under Maduro’s presidency, not shrunk. Or, that the nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry took place more than 40 years ago – long before Chavez and Maduro were ever elected to the Venezuelan presidency.

The straightforward facts of Venezuela’s economy: that it has always relied in an extremely narrow range of commodity exports (coffee, oil) for its national income, and that it has consistently failed to make itself less dependent on imported necessities – especially food – by diversifying and/or industrialising its economy – are omitted. Hehir is simply not interested in informing his readers that severe economic crises – sparked by sudden collapses in key commodity prices – have been a regular feature of Venezuela’s economic history.

Maduro’s failures – and there are many – are attributable less to his socialist beliefs than to his own, and his predecessor’s, failure to use the massive economic surpluses, racked up when oil was fetching almost twice as much on the international markets as it is currently, to diversify Venezuela’s economy. That they were more concerned to lift the living standards of the poorest Venezuelans as quickly as possible, while understandable, was also – given the country’s history – unforgiveable.

Both Chavez and Maduro should have understood that economic crises experienced under right-wing governments are regarded very differently by the United States than economic crises which strike when left-wing and/or anti-American governments are in power. In the case of the former, the nation’s troubles are merely the result of impersonal market forces. In the latter’s case, however, economic crisis is presented as incontestable proof of socialism’s failure. And, if the economic and social elites can magnify the hardship and suffering of those on whose behalf the left-wing government has been acting, then why wouldn’t they? Especially when the US Government is so willing to help them out with money and advice. “Make the economy scream”, said President Richard Nixon’s advisers – back in the early 1970s, when the US was faced with another democratically elected left-wing government in South America. It worked then – it’s working now.

It’s what I find so hard to forgive about the position taken by Hehir and his right-wing colleagues. That they are aligning themselves with those who are most to blame for the travails of the Venezuelan people. The Bolivarian Revolution, itself, grew out of the popular resistance inspired by the vicious austerity measures which the poorest of the Venezuelan poor were expected to bear in order to rescue the economy form yet another commodity-price collapse back in the 1990s.

Hehir has nothing to say about the coup mounted against Chavez by Venezuela’s economic and social elites in 2002, after the wretched inhabitants of the capital city’s slums had had the temerity to vote him into power. Or how the education Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution had given them in their constitutional rights as citizens propelled the poor onto the streets in their thousands to rescue their president – and their democracy.

Hehir and his ilk would like us to believe that all those protesting against Maduro’s inept handling of the unceasing political and economic crises by which he has been beset are unanimously for Guaido and his American puppet-masters. They are not. Many are seeking new elections and new leaders. But, they are not seeking a restoration of elite power. Nor will they countenance an American invasion of their homeland.

Those who await with such eagerness the tramp of military boots on the streets of Caracas are partisans of coup, counter-revolution, and the violent repression of the poorest citizens of Venezuela. The Right is, therefore, ranging itself alongside the most ruthless and selfish elements of Venezuelan society. Elements whose democratic rights have, for more than a decade, been upheld by the very government they are pledged to destroy: with democracy, if possible; without it, if necessary. Hehir lambasts Chavez and Maduro as the Lenin and Stalin of socialist Venezuela. It’s a puerile accusation. Had Chavez been a genuine Leninist, and Maduro an unashamed Stalinist, then the streets of Caracas would have run red with bourgeois blood.

And yet, unaccountably, the Venezuelan elites have survived: to plot in safety, and protest in their tens-of-thousands. Demanding, like the Chilean elites before them, that the military intervene ruthlessly on their behalf. Confident, in equal measure, that the Americans will not let them down, and that the rivers of blood flowing through the streets of Caracas will not be theirs.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 5 February 2019.