Social Justice is the problem, Economic Justice is the solution

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Comrades.

Th Identity Politics Left has lurched into ‘Social Justice’ territory which alienates more than it attracts. As a class left supporter, I believe the demarkation of power in society is between the 1% and their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.

Economic Justice does more than banning Gay Conversion, criminalising speech or gerrymandering the legal system to ensure anyone accused is found guilty, it redistributes wealth and makes direct provision to the cost of every day living. Beneficiaries and working class people care less about pronouns and the correct pronunciation of te Reo than they do about how to pay next weeks rent and power bill!

Pure temple doctrine divides & alienates. Broadchurch universals build solidarity.

I’m not interested in social justice wokedom any more, it is a minefield of competing schisms throwing vitriol at one another.

Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the middle classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.

I am interested in Economic Justice and the immediate welfare of the poorest amongst us while providing immediate life condition upgrades.

We need to be kinder to People and crueler to Corporates.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

When the woke have finished arguing over who is most right and who is most wrong, they can join in.

How do we use the power of the State to universally subsidise the lives of the poorest in a way that is meaningful to them? Paying higher benefits is one way but the vile MSD finds ways to claw any of this increases back the way thy did with Labour’s last pitiful rise.

Let’s push for policies that have a direct impact on the lives of the poorest so that educational and quality of life standards actually rise. Let’s take direct cost out of people’s pockets just for existing.  Removing public transport costs and kids breakfasts and lunches would have a dramatic impact on the lives of the poor.

Let’s ensure taxation is targeted at the corporates and the wealthy while subsidising the costs of the poorest.

I present the 10 point Left wing Economic Justice Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand.

1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help.

2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs.

3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.

4: Doubling welfare payments and student allowances minus any bullshit claw backs from MSD plus Living Wage universally adopted as minimum working wage.

5: GST off fresh fruit and vegetables and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health plus a sugar tax.

6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.

7: Debt cancellation – student loans, welfare overpayments, beneficiary debt, easier debt cancellation.

8: Taxation focused on corporations like financial transaction tax and first $10 000 is tax free.

9: Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements) plus universal union membership.

10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances. 

Don’t tell me we can’t afford any of this, we just shovelled $60 billion into the pockets of property speculators, we can shovel a tiny fraction of that into the mouths of the poorest.

While the middle class Identity Politics clique continue to find ways to divide us with social justice, economic justice can be a populist working class antidote to the alienation of woke cancel culture.

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19 COMMENTS

  1. To focus on one example, Labour or any government; there can NEVER be enough housing suppliments and there will never have enough time or material to build enough state houses to satisfy demand if you/they continue to leave housing with its tax free -low debt – high profit mess like the way its being done right now.

    Not only that but the ghettos that you are building in the name of social housing to bandaid your refusal to address the fundamental problems of the housing crisis, is only going to cause a whole raft of new unbudgeted problems ten years from now.

    Fix the housing market crisis means stopping the gravy train for the few to benefit the many.

    You can raise minimum wage levels, up subsidies on housing and electricity, raise benefits and have people tied to the state to get through life but if it’s ultimately going to end up in the pockets of bank shareholders or landlords, then Labour, you may as well give up.

    Fix the housing crisis, and deep down you know just how to, and you can tick most of the articles list off.

    But what are the chances?.

    • Measures like arbitrarily raising minimum wages just means that the already functionally unemployable become even less attractive to businesses, raises prices to compensate for the increased business expense that sees no concomitant increase in productivity, and means people who are already earning higher than the minimum wage will be less likely to get a pay rise themselves. It is also an indictment on the education system. The strategy of living on a minimum wage is no strategy at all. Those jobs should be entry-level and a short-term situation. Nonetheless, it sounds great in the cartoon world inhabited by the left. Bringing thousands more people into the country every year, who also require jobs and houses, does nothing for the wages and house prices either.

      • Nice little echo chamber you’ve built. You obviously want to protect your world view even though it’s stunting your intellectual growth.

        • I’m not the one disposed to calling people Comrade. Your own worldview was discredited about 100 years ago. Got any thoughts though, other than Death to the Capitalist Pigs? I come from the right in peace, and I’d love to analyse your contribution, but I cannot see one. My intellectual growth is, frankly, stunning, not stunted.

          • It is always nice to see people talk verbally and resolve things,

            We can talk about the motivation for a counter austerity budget to Labours corona resellience budget (you’re right that’s another issue), a lot of people are motivated towards austerity to avoid what they take to be surplus.

  2. To Antoine Forbes-Hamilton.
    In every instance world-wide where minimum wages have raised consumer spending increases and there is economic growth throughout the nation.
    This came to be realised by rabid right wing free market reformers like Theodore Roosevelt and conservatives like Harold MacMillian. In New Zealand by National Party Leaders like Gordon Coates, Sid Holland and Keith Holyoake.
    What is happening now is; ‘Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor’.
    Employers pay wages that are too low for workers to support families.
    They receive working for families payments from MSD – taxpayers money to top up their wages.
    I am writing this in large letters so you get the point.
    TAXPAYERS LIKE ME ARE SUBSIDISING ARSEHOLE EMPLOYERS WHO INVEST MONEY IN OTHER ENTERPRISES INSTEAD OF PAYING PROPER WAGES TO THEIR EMPLOYEES.
    Left winger that I am I do not live in a cartoon world as squire of the manor tossing coins to the kneeling peasantry while I claim the virginity of their daughters as my ‘droit d’segnieur’.
    You need to come out of your Georgian/Victorian age fantasy.
    Death to Capitalism! Long live Socialism!

    • Mate, everyone gets paid exactly what you are worth, a calculus based on their skills and the total amount of available labour (and therefore the demand) for that labour. If you don’t like that, start your own business.

      Say you make coffee for a living. Unless you set up your own enterprise, your employer “exploits” you (as you Commies love to say) in the sense that you (the employee) are “paying” your employer a portion of your productivity, in order that you are able to benefit from the ability to use his or her coffee machine, milk, electricity, rented space and so on to make a weeks wages. You cannot just walk out the door and start making coffee out of thin air. Instead, you just show up at his or her business and start making money from his or her existing set-up, where the risk and investment is all your bosses. Again, if you cannot handle that arrangement, start your own enterprise and become a boss. It is you who are in fantasy land, Comrade.

    • An excellent response to the neo-Victorian Stevie. Why should we have a Bolsonaro when we could aspire to having a Lula? If Brazil can support a movement that will re-birth a Socialist government that was able to lift 80 million out of abject poverty, why are Labour, a formerly socialist movement, ostentatiously screwing over the un-wealthy to overflow the pockets of the rich?

      • aom
        Hook a brother up: where are all of these Socialist utopias you seem to believe in? Today, or at any time in history? They are fairytales sold to envious fools by others who want to dominate you, and me. People are not equal, never have been and never will be, so trying to achieve “equality” by forcing a square peg into a round hole, eventually always at gunpoint, is just denying objective reality and all of the accumulated evidence of history.

  3. Speaking on big business and poverty. Mozambique have such riches, but the locals face such atrocities and poverty while $20b gas projects are going on… Global big business and taking of local resources, is a big part of the problem for world inequality and governments seem more interested in the foreign money (with generous koha to politicians) than their own people’s wellbeing.

    “Cabo Delgado is a fabulously wealthy province blessed with precious stones and vast gas reserves. The attacks occur in the shadow of the largest investment project in sub-Saharan Africa, a $20b gas project run by Total with investments from France, Japan, the US and the UK.”

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/children-as-young-as-11-decapitated-in-mozambique-by-jihadists/H6SMT7MQXRFUQAJ3QOER4T7QNM/

    NZ is no stranger to it. We are not being beheaded (just mass shootings) or giving in squatter camps yet (1 room motels or student dorm rooms where bodies lie undiscovered), but what will the next 20 years bring? Especially when people in rich countries can’t afford resources like food and water, because their government has given the rights away to local resources and taxes go towards corporate welfare (cheap electricity, government clean ups of their waste) like Rio Tinto.

    Anybody in the world seems to deserve a house and support more than a Kiwi in their own country.
    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/124477657/syrian-refugee-spent-a-year-trapped-at-an-airport-before-new-life-in-nz

    Oranga Tamariki is keen to support the Australian deported 15yo child. (Which they should) but sadly seems to have failed so many children in NZ who don’t get the intense publicity and support that overseas children do https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-oranga-tamariki-bungled-the-handling-of-baby-brought-to-new-zealand-by-drug-traffickers/LO6F3JTLB7UQF4YYDXP2NNAFVA/ and instead many NZ citizen children are victimised and revictimised. NZ doesn’t seem to be a lucky country for NZ citizen children born to NZ citizen dysfunctional parents here. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/116156349/a-scuffle-at-mcdonalds-and-a-police-officers-hunch-the-solving-of-dimetrius-pairamas-murder https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/384748/deeply-disturbing-more-than-200-children-abused-in-state-care-in-6-months-reports-show

      • Thanks Shona. If more countries could hang onto their own natural resources and have the wealth going to their own people, it would go a long way towards helping inequality.

        In addition export tariffs had a role to play and NZ seemed to be richer when countries had import/export tariffs to stop what is happening now under globalism, aka everything coming from cheap labour, goods and services, countries while ‘rich’ countries push the cost of working, middle class labour downwards in relation to the cost of living 30 years ago.

        Every country has resources (and some of the ‘poor’ countries have high value resources with the most poverty), but now individuals through global organisations seem to be making all the profits (without the taxes that ordinary people pay) with politicians all for it, while the people suffer all around the world.

  4. ‘Economic Justice does more than banning Gay Conversation’. I’m guessing you mean Gay Conversion. Beyond that, 10 out of 10.

  5. ‘Mate, everyone gets paid exactly what you are worth’
    So who pays you to be a prick and what is it worth?
    As I pointed out my taxes support areshole employers who do not pay their employees enough to live on.
    You did not address this because of course you cannot.
    Everybody has the right to be stupid but you really do abuse the privilege.

    • Stevie: I cannot use your abuse. You may have it back. This is volunteer work, btw.

  6. What New Zealand’s increasing number of havenots needs is a Renters Rebellion party that campaigns solely on economic issues, and remains publicly agnostic on all non-economic social-justice jiggery-wokery. All its parliamentary candidates would be non-property-owning renters.
    It might attract enough votes from renters who see no point in voting for neoliberal Labour to actually make it into Parliament on a programme of state lifetime-rental houses for all who want them, and a $500-a-week UBI. With enough seats, it would force Labour into an anti-poor coalition with National and Act, resulting in the extinction of ‘Labour’ in the subsequent election.

    • The only way we get a UBI is if we have at least 3 crises that triggers a fundamental loss of faith in the government.

      A UBI has really really nice analysis that everyone either hangs all of the good or all of the bad on but nothing really leading towards actual results.

      Conclusions and results are extremely important for figuring out which assumptions are true.

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