By Snoopman [Updated 25 March 2016]
Smelly Flag of Tricks
Think of a smell. A fishy-smell.
Now think of New Zealand’s Flag Change ‘debate’.
Ever since New Zealand’s prime minister drew his ‘silver fern’ flag on TVNZ’s ‘Breakfast’ show in 2010, John Key has steadily morphed into Nu Zillun’s premiere Matador.
Whenever New Zealand’s many-hatted prime minister has needed to distract the push-over Kiwi population from the big metaphorical pink elephant bull in the newsroom – the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) – New Zealand’s Invertebrate Corporate-Biased Media (ICBM) outlets have obliged.
Like other adults who haven’t been taught Stranger-Danger for Grown-ups, the ICBM media missionaries fill the daily or weekly ‘news-hole’ of airtime, print-space and cyberspace with Zombie-brain cliched catch phrases on flag-fluff based on phone polling surveys. Gems like, “It’s time we severed the umbilical cord to the British Monarchy”, “We need a flag that doesn’t look like Australia’s”, and “Let’s be positive and focus on what flag best represents all of us as a maturing nation”, are stated so that people cast as Sheeple repeat them as though they are their opinions. Sheeple have been trained to accept views from the cues they’ve heard from the Pixel People of Teleland.
It is as though New Zealand has become a place where having thinky conversations involving big-picture context is now considered ‘Scary Stuff’ and is Classified. In helping to pull off this magic ‘flag trick’, the ICBM missionaries fail to do the journalistic equivalent of the legal fraternity’s ‘due diligence’, by avoiding getting themselves into a position to check under the TPP text-hood for STD’s – Standard Tactical Deceptions.
The timing of the 2nd flag referendum was more than fishy.
It was held between March 3 and March 24, with 1.2 million people voting to keep the current flag and 915,000 voting for the proposed white ‘silverfern’ flag. The 2nd flag referendum pre-publicity cranked up straight after the symbolic signing of the 12 ‘country’ Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), that occurred on February 4. The symbolic signing, which took place in Auckland’s Sky City casino complex, was marked by protests that shut down the CBD streets.
It was more than fishy because a mere week after the symbolic signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a brief window of time was quietly opened by the New Zealand government to receive submissions on the TPP. The public have been given a stingy one-month time-window to send submissions, which closed on Friday 11 March at 5pm.
So.
No referendum for the TPP, even though it’s has been in the pipeline for 6 years.
The subtext inherent to this dismissal to a quiet as a newsroom-mouse parliamentary panel – boringly called the International Treaty Examination on the Trans-Pacific Partnership – is this: “Everything is fine, stupid”.
Not surprisingly, given New Zealand’s Invertebrate Corporate-Biased Media (ICBM) outlets – MediaWorks, Fairfax Media, APN/NZME, Sky TV, and TVNZ – the Flag of Tricks has worked remarkably well for Nu Zillun’s premiere Matador – so far.
Standard Tactical Deceptions are also about what is omitted from an official treaty document (or the signing copy), such as the 6,000 page door-stopper TPP text, as the native people of New Zealand – he tangata Māori – well know.
Indeed, omissions of key evidence are the crucial trick of propaganda, as viewers of the thinky-film, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media will attest. In societies with formal democracy, a propagandist system of communication is required because the state cannot openly intimidate and suppress ‘free’ populations without losing the legitimacy to rule, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue compellingly in their thinky-book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
The fishy smell has been noticed by New Zealand’s Push-Over Kiwi Population (POKP) demographic, because everyone in the Anglo-American Empire’s southern hemisphere ‘Farm’ knows about the 15,000 to 20,000 strong anti-TPPA protest (that blocked Auckland’s CBD in the middle of day on February 4 2016).
This is in spite of the big fact that the Push-Over Kiwi Population (POKP) demographic have been systematically Zombie-fied by an incessant stream of reality TV, video games, and even sport – featuring the Athletic Undead from a world rumoured to be called ‘Outside’.
The blockades of intersections provoked the Kiwi population to ask: What aren’t we being told about the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Mega-Treaty Trifecta
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP) is the legal, economic and political framework that – if rail-roaded through the 12 signing country’s parliaments – will allow the market dominating transnational corporations and the super-rich that own them to coerce central and local governments to submit to their concentrated power.
The TPP, along with its Atlantic Ocean fraternal sibling, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, (or TIPP) and the all-encompassing stealthy sibling, Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), represent the formation of massive economic blocs.
The TPP, TTIP, and TISA agreements are the superstructure that will position the United States at the centre of an Anglo-Euro-American Empire. These three impending mega-treaty deals are, in fact, protectionist economic blocs, that together comprise two thirds of global economic activity across 78 states.
The intention is to construct an empire of subservient vassal states that can lock out the BRICS-led bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, if they fail to submit to the Anglo-Euro-American Empire. While, at the same time, the intention underpinning the planned TPP-TTIP-TISA super-blocs regime is to permanently lock in the changes at an international (or supranational) level, so that ‘governance’ is taken beyond the reach of nation state-based citizens. This strategy is known as ‘new constitutionalism’, as law scholar Stephen Gill identified.
In other words, democracy is becoming a thin-shell protecting the white-washed new administrative system – technocracy – to be run by scientists, engineers, and technocrats on behalf of an unseen yoke of super-rich people, who in smarty-pants language are termed an oligarchy. Oligarchs are tax-averse super-rich people who use their enormous economic wealth to accumulate political power, as Dr. Jeffrey Winters explained in his book Oligarchy. Such tax-averse oligarchs can only exist in societies where there is a great disparity in wealth. Oligarchs thrive in crisis-ridden societies.
Oligarchs are dangerous.
Oligarchies cause war, famine, poverty, pestilence, pandemics, environmental collapse and oppression, serfdom and slavery, as Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley writes in his Against Oligarchy e-book series. Their vast control of economic resources leads to structural domination of the political trajectory of whole societies, and is known as Oligarchism.
The transformations in the global economy, such as these huge economic protective trade-blocs promoted under the slogan of ‘free trade’, are really about creating a slickly-marketed, hi-tech totalitarian superstructure, worldwide. American journalist Chris Hedges has reported a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell. From the perspective of dominant capitalist coalitions (or oligarchs), the public and private sectors are two divisions of Global Capitalism and democracy is its administrative system.
It turns out that Global Capitalism’s core motive is social control. Global Capitalism achieves this by limiting as many people as possible from having access to land and other resources, as Frances Hutchinson argued in What Everyone Wants to Know About Money and in The Politics of Money (as well as Nitzan and Bichler in Capital as Power). This political control is primarily achieved through a deliberate scarcity of cash and an abundance of manufactured credit/debt that banks whisk out of annoyingly thin-air through the possession of a metaphorical magical wand (or the power of a fraternal Old Boys’ Network). Or, to put it another way, dynastic banking families and their global banking cartels sucker mass populaces to borrow credit funds into existence, as English economist Michael Rowbotham showed in his book, The Grip of Death: A Study in Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics and Goodbye America! Globalisation, Debt and the Dollar Empire, and as investor Mike Maloney shows in his thinky-film series, “The Biggest Scam In The History Of Mankind“.
This scarcity of debt-free cash is controlled by the oligarchic bankers – such as the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Schröders, the Schiffs, the Vanderbilts, the Stillmans, the Lazards, the Bakers, the Harrimans, the Rothschilds, the Browns, the Wallenbergs and the Meyers – because it is the wealthiest that own the major banking cartels that, in turn, have come to control the governments of the world through coercion. By gaining control of credit creation over several centuries, through military, economic and psychological warfare, dynastic banking families have captured states that are forced to ‘borrow’ manufactured credit to meet revenue shortfalls.
These secrets of magically conjured credit are among the many Standard Tactical Deceptions that ex-Wall Street & London banker and New Zealand’s PM John Key has maintained since before he recast himself as ‘The Matador’. [Key has borrowed $300 million a week from undisclosed ‘foreign pixies’ to keep the NZ Inc. economy ‘solvent’.]
Indeed, when you realize that armies of professionals have constructed a World Tax Haven Complex for the super-rich and their transnational corporations to safely evade taxes, it becomes clearer that countries are really Human Farms, ‘ordinary people’ have been cast as Tax Cattle, and democracy is the Farm Management System.
Thus, we are bonded to a debt enslavement system.
The Cage is Being Rebuilt
This new constitutional framework is intended to permanently lock in the property rights of a transnational capitalist class with a status that amounts to ‘commercialized sovereignty’ as the world’s leading scholars on tax havenry, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux argued in their book, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) includes Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses that enable transnational corporations to sue the partnering governments if their boards and wealthy owners decide that their expectations about future profits are being blocked by pesky legislation, oversight and treaties. [Conflicts over international trade are often taken to the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investments Disputes in downtown Washington D.C.] Under the TPP, these private tribunals would be empowered to sue governments or make them change laws to suit mining companies and oil exploration cartels, sweat-shop labour exploiting brands, and tax haven-addicted global banking cartels.
In their book, Capital as Power, political economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan persuasively argue capitalism is a private political system that uses economic means to control society. It is therefore, no wonder, that these mega-cartel treaties have been negotiated in secret (and continue to be).
When challenged about this secrecy, politicians have stated these deals don’t get finished if they are exposed to public scrutiny. It was only 20 months ago that TPPA planners were hanging onto the idea that the text would not be released until 4-5 years after it was signed. But, the release of leaked chapters by WikiLeaks and a global groundswell of opposition forced their hand to release the TPPA through New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, thereby providing a safe-haven to host the signing, 8,619 miles from Washington D.C. and far, far away from mildly-nosy ICBM missionaries.
So it is poignant to note that one major ‘civil liberty’ in a democracy is the ‘freedom’ to protest, as granted to us – the Tax Cattle – by the tax-averse Human Farmers, who rule over us. The trickery inherent to being granted liberties is that it makes the Human Livestock more productive and earns the Human Farmers more profit when the Human Livestock believe the illusion they are free. Broadly, the condition for allowing representative or limited democracy is that the democratic society does not bother the oligarchy.
The ‘coincidence’ of the 2nd New Zealand Flag referendum overlapping the International Treaty submissions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership is also more than fishy, given that all of ‘Key as The Matador’ Flag of Tricks posturing occurs amid the continued application of the Shock Doctrine, a stealthy project that is used to mete-out a ‘strategic sabotage of society’. Meanwhile, the dominant coalitions of capitalists accumulate more power through outsized economic gain made by exploiting engineered economic crises. These engineered crises are in-built into so-called liberalized ‘free market’ economies, wherein regimes are re-regulated to suit big corporations and their demands for free-wheeling flows of capital between jurisdictions.
It turns out, the global deployment of ‘free market’ regimes were planned in a New York-based global policy-shaping think-tank’s secret blueprint called the ‘1980s Project’ during in the early 1970s. The hidden intention behind the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored ‘1980s Project’ was to discipline the disobedient of the 1960s peoples’ movements for their wayward aspirations for more liberties. Thus, even highly-publicized projects can have conspiracy in-built into them. The crucial element is a hidden intent to harm society.
It is no small wonder then that New Zealand’s Invertebrate Corporate-Biased Media (ICBM) outlets, which are controlled by five rivalrous market-dominating cartels, are doing a stupendous job to support ‘The Matador’ as he steers The Farm’s Kiwi Tax Flock into new enclosures.
Indeed, in an opinion piece titled “An Open Letter to TPP Protesters” published on the pro-corporate National Business Review (NBR) website, media missionary Nathan Smith argued that protesting is a “comprehensive surrender to the media”, which he describes as “a machinery of power” and “an arm of the state”. Smith’s point is that protests are simply set-pieces in ‘the system’ with its own ‘rules’, which he does not name or define. Smith, who says because the protesters are too stupid and skill-less at present to learn of these phenomena, they can’t possibly begin to change them, wrote:
“The media doesn’t care for nuance and reasoned debate: It wants a cage fight because that makes for good clicking. The media’s job is to package a protest as a Manichean commodity, and which side is the light or dark is entirely up to the editors and journalists.”
The Invertebrate Corporate-Biased Media missionaries have failed to ask themselves a fundamental question: If all ICBM news outlets in ‘the West’ don’t investigate this end-run around national sovereignty and the quest to construct regional super-states, how do they think this dangerous game of world domination is going to work out well for any of us?
To fight back, Kiwis afflicted with a disorder called Political Puberty Procrastination Psychosis (PPPP) will need to go through political puberty. This means growing political balls and ovaries, and hearts, each according to one’s sexuality.
The leaders fighting the TPP-TTIP-TISA treaties trifecta will be wasting everyone’s time if they do not contextualize the construction of these super-bloc structures as mechanisms of coercion. Make no mistake, the TPP-TTIP-TISA treaties up-the-ante in an economic warfare framework that was field-tested between the mid-1960s and 1970s – and identified as the Shock Doctrine.
New Zealand has not been immune to this viscous application of the Shock Doctrine, which has included an un-stated state policy to create persistent unemployment since 1984 (because high numbers of desperate excess labour create a visible threat that impairs worker pay-bargaining power and therefore keeps labour costs down). In short, poverty is caused by the super-rich.
Articulating this Shock Doctrine connection will provoke those afflicted with PPPP to make the jump through political puberty and bring on a much needed consciousness-paradigm shift in Nu Zillun.
Human beings everywhere need to strategize, organize and mobilize grassroots radical actions to pursue mass land reform (or redistribution), community-controlled cooperative enterprises, and resilient permaculture communities. Concurrent to these positive solution-oriented projects, the damaging institutional constructs need to be dismantled. Corporate cartels (including debt-based banking and financial conglomerates) have to be broken up. Tax havenry needs to be confronted head-on. The Shock Doctrine of economic, financial and military warfare engineered by key insiders of Western banks and other major corporations, governments and think-tanks also needs to be challenged.
And finally, Oligarchism needs to be recognized as the prime menace the world faces. It is essential that oligarchs everywhere are tried for conspiring against humanity. Instead of locking them up in prisons, it would be wise to exhibit them in the world’s zoos so that humanity goes through an epochal consciousness shift by learning about the psychopathic behaviours of Homo Oligarchicus.
To see that the cage is being re-built is to psychologically leave it.
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Decide on the issues you want to focus on in your submission –
see TPPA fact sheets and TPPA critical research and TPPLegal
This story is mirrored also on a U.S. website www.filmsforaction.org at: The Matador: John Key & His Flag of Tricks
See related story – MEDIA RELEASE: Trans-Pacific Treaty Public Submissions/John Key’s Flag Trick Distraction at: https://snoopman.net.nz/2016/02/28/media-release-trans-pacific-treaty-public-submissionsjohn-keys-flag-trick-distraction/