FACED WITH a deepening cost of living crisis the Labour Government has set out to protect the interests of the wealthy by driving up unemployment and triggering a recession. This is not a secret agenda. Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr told a meeting of Parliament’s finance and expenditure committee in November that it was necessary to squeeze the 'horrible environment' of high inflation out of the economy.
Orr agreed with Green MP Chloe Swarbrick that the Reserve Bank was deliberately engineering a recession in an attempt to drive down inflation. The Reserve Bank has concluded that this is only way to counter rising prices. But it will also throw thousands of people out of work and leave thousands more struggling to keep their heads above water. Many will drown.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson's repeated assertion that his government has the backs of ordinary people is a cynical falsehood. But it is a falsehood that Labour's minions in the media will continue to busy themselves promoting as 'evidence' that Labour is the 'lesser evil'. The dismal Morgan Godfery in a December 30 column laughably claimed that Robertson, a fiscal conservative, has been acting like a traditional social democrat. Godfery is spreading disinformation. Perhaps Kate Hannah of the Disinformation Project could take a look at his activities.
But not everybody is feeling the pinch. Corporate profits have soared some sixty percent over the past two years. This has prompted calls for a windfall tax, a demand that Robertson has been quick to sideline.
This Labour Government has overseen a massive rise in inequality and herein lies the political reason for triggering a recession. The cost of living crisis has exposed the vast chasm between the rich elite and everybody else and it is hoped that a recession will discourage workers from deciding that enough is enough and that a collective response is now required. I'm reminded that Margaret Thatcher drove interest rates up a massive seventeen percent during the protracted war with the miners.
But as the occupation of Parliament grounds last year signalled, many people no longer feel they have anything left to lose. In desperate times the power of fear begins to lose its potency and the status quo no longer seems as monolithic and unshakeable as it once appeared. And the political establishment, in the ferocity of its attacks on the protesters, displayed a willingness to employ state power to crush dissent it does not approve of. It also displayed that it is out of touch with what is happening out there in the community.
In an economy characterised by poverty, inequality and hardship, working people can no longer be expected to obey the orders of the powerful.
There is also a general election this year and the political establishment will hope to drive the rising discontent in the direction of the polling booths. But none of the present slate of parliamentary parties are offering anything like an economic alternative to neoliberalism. The general election is a political dead end. The over 700,000 people who no longer vote have worked that out even if the Commentariat hasn't.
Seriously tackling the cost of living crisis, as opposed to protecting the interests of the political establishment, means offering an alternative to our present economic model. That alternative lies in the solutions provided by socialism.
In maintaining the status quo, the ''lesser evil'' game must be the most effective con perpetrated on the people in living history.
ReplyDeleteTweddle dum versus tweedle dee, and the people are rendered powerless. And yes one can be nastier, at times. But all we can do is vote for the slightly less odious flavour of our own oppression.