A billionaire’s intellectual support to National’s strategic partner – the far-right ACT Party – signals a desire for Big Business Beneficiaries to push through more ‘market solutions’ to the crises that face New Zealand. However, by writing a foreword to a book entitled, Own Your Future, written by ACT Party Leader David Seymour, billionaire Stephen Jennings fails to acknowledge that crises such as housing, poverty, infrastructure, unemployment and education were created or worsened by the Lange-Labour and Bolger-National Governments. Jennings was a Treasury economist among a clique of ‘free market’ Economic Shock Therapists, that were first given free reign during the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Those Economic Shock Therapies were designed as policy shocks to favour the super-rich, and to catapult key insiders into wealth, as Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards finds.
Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards
Plastering-over Root Causes to Crises
New Zealand-born Billionaire Stephen Jennings’ foreword to a book entitled, Own Your Future, written by ACT Party Leader David Seymour, signals a warning to incumbent National government.
Released on 10 August 2017, the book is the far-right party’s political manifesto in Seymour’s ‘voice’.
Jennings believes “the negative social, economic and political indicators emitting from the major Anglo-Saxon countries carries serious warnings for New Zealand.” This general message is the same one Jennings expressed when he returned to New Zealand for a whistle-stop visit in mid-2016.
Own Your Future presents flawed arguments that are designed to produce ‘market solutions’ to problems created by the same thinking that created them. For example, ACT’s solution to transport issues includes implementing a targeted pricing model for road user charges through electronic tolls, setting higher prices during peak traffic times. Creating new forms of toll booths is a favourite prescriptions of ‘free market’ missionaries. What ACT doesn’t say is the drive to make Auckland a huge world city came of ‘free market’ policy planners working on behalf of super-wealthy Rich-Listers – foreign and domestic.
Indeed, it was the Rich-Listers’ avarice that embroiled Auckland City in a ‘Global Cities Movement’ project, wherein such world-cities are serviced by public debt-funded infrastructure, Neo-Colonial institutions favouring high capital mobility, and large pools of excess labour to support the huge geographically-dispersed transnational corporations that seek to accumulate capital faster and faster.
Because Seymour has an attitude that, “the first thing the government can do is get out of the way”, he overlooks the need for public transport to be actually public transport, rather than privately-owned consortiums. His profit autism is a bias that means he overlooks more effective solutions to traffic conjection. Seymour overlooks the value of displacing cars off roads by building light rail above ground through the middle of existing main roads, or arterial routes, and up the middle of motorways – all of which Auckland has an abundance of. Instead, he favours hi-tech APs to popularize and uber-ize ride-sharing, while we wait for the ‘Smart dystopia’ with automated cars.
Thus, Seymour’s book promotes an over simplistic view, that central and local government are bad and ‘free market’ entrepreneurial enterprise is good. This division ignores what is really going on behind the political theatre presented to the public.
From the perspective of dominant capitalist coalitions, the public and private sectors are two divisions of their system, and democracy is simply the administrative system. When there’s ‘too much democracy’, Big Business becomes unhappy.
With this logic in mind, Seymour’s book works as the ACT Party’s manifesto. It therefore can be seen for what is: a political playbook.
Seymour presents the view that populist politicians are to blame for putting the breaks on the ‘free market’ visionaries’ zeal for solving problems through market price mechanisms. He says that numerous sectors – education, housing, transportation, welfare, penal corrections and crime, superannuation and tax, immigration, environment, harmful habits and personal rights, and Treaty claims – need further reforming. But, the one sector that is glaringly absent from direct criticism and is only mentioned in passing: Rich Listers.
Predictably, Seymour fails to nail the root cause of housing affordability. Like his billionaire friend, Stephen Jennings, the ACT Party leader says more supply would bring down the price of properties and houses. He advocates de-regulating housing supply, which means scrapping planning laws that get in the way of developers, such as the Metropolitan Limit that protects green spaces from urban sprawl.
This supply and demand argument is over-simplistic Economics 101.
It is not PC to explain that supply and demand are not the primary determinants of price in New Zealand, especially in a land where you would think there were no farms, orchards or market gardens given that you can buy the same exported produce cheaper in Singapore.
The supply and demand determines price formula ignores the role of global banking industries, which operate as cartels, to control a system of private credit that becomes public debt. Central banks and commercial banks act together as cartels to maintain a scarcity of cash, so that individuals, businesses and governments can never earn enough cash and are coerced to borrow to finance a home, an enterprise or public projects. Meanwhile, the global banking fraternity maintains monopoly supplies over debt-based, interest-bearing currency enslavement systems.[1]
The rort includes commercial banks manufacturing interest-bearing credit that they fraudulently market as ‘loans’. The role of mortgage derivatives makes loans more expensive because these financial bets add a layer of speculators seeking a cut.
Seymour hints at these phenomena in passing, rather euphemistically, as the ‘international financial community’, who would bump up the price of credit to the New Zealand economy, if we veered too far off the ‘free market’ revolution. Here, Seymour was acknowledging that interest is the fee that banks charge for continuing to supply their manufactured credit, which is what economist Thorstein Veblen figured out early last century. In others words, ‘international financiers’ and austerity-prescribing technocrats out-flanked the communists in central planning through financing both sides of wars, engineering financial crises and meting out economic warfare shock policies, as historian U.S. Carroll Quigley pointed out in 1966, forty years before Canadian journalist Naomi Klein coined the term, the Shock Doctrine. We are after-all, talking about Neo-Colonial Capitalism, which is a private political system that uses economic means to restrict as many people as possible from having access to land, resources and systems through a system of highly-networked coalitions of capitalists.
To put it another way, the major of driver of New Zealand’s housing unaffordability crisis is the result of a greed-filled quest for wealth accumulation and a fear-inspired search for bolt-holes, led by a Neo-Colonialist Sect of Rich-Listers – both foreign and domestic. Neo-Colonialism is the hidden construction of vast monopolistic transnational consortiums owned by super-wealthy people who are positioned atop the Transnational Capitalist Class to control whole economies.
ACT’s Purpose in Political Theatre
It follows that Seymour’s Own Your Future is essentially a policy prescription to test new economic shock policies. Indeed, when it is understood that the ACT Party’s role is to float new policies for its perennial political accomplice – the Pepsi National Party – and their big corporate backers – the publication of his book with a foreword from Jennings becomes clearer.
ACT’s purpose in life is the political equivalent of market-testing new fizzy drinks that only come in a super-sized plastic bottle manufactured minus the lid. The original logic for creating an far-right political party that makes fizzy drink policy bottles without lids, is that the ACT Party was devised to test policies for the Pepsi National Party in the MMP environment. If the Pepsi National Party floated radical policies to the public, they would leech big chunks of crucial swing voters if the ideas turned out to be clunkers.[2] Yet, the fizzy drinks usually goes quickly flat because ACT Party people refuse to take responsibility for not putting a lid on it.
Among the founders of the ACT Party was libertarian Sir Alan Gibbs, who also founded the New Zealand branch of the far-right think-tank, the Centre for Political Studies, and who has been a long-time member of the Mont Pèlerin Society.[3] Gibbs was among the key insiders involved in the corporate takeover of New Zealand, who were concentrated in the far-right think-tank, the Zealand Business Roundtable, which acted as one of several front-groups for the Mont Pèlerin Society, the chief economic warfare unit of the British Crown.[4] The ACT Party was established in 1994 as an alter-ego of the Business Roundtable to be a vanguard for the far-right class warfare agenda once the battle to keep the New Zealand Realm MMP-free was lost by popular referendum in 1993.
A valuable indicator of the influence of the wealthy, the politically connected and professional brains is political party donation data. However, a complete public record of the ACT Party’s funding is missing because the Electoral Finance Act rules do not cover donations outside the three-month election campaigning period. In this respect, the fizzy ACT Party is comparable to Wiley E. Coyote’s enterprising attempts to kill the indomitable, free-spirited Roadrunner. The sources of funding of the infamous Coyote – genus canus latrans – used to purchase supplies such as armaments, explosives and rockets from the shell-company, ACME, have never been fully revealed.
The libertarian ACT Party’s recruitment of Russia’s one-time only New Zealand-born billionaire shouts loudly that far-right Rich Lister Kiwis are unwilling to fess up to their culpability in deploying and maintaining the Shock Doctrine economic warfare framework since 1984.
Ironically, the ACT Party has a policy called Rewarding Self-Improvement in Prison that shaves six weeks off each year for the successful completion of each program – literacy, numeracy, and driver licensing. Not surprisingly, there is no policy for encouraging ‘free market’ shock therapists to present themselves to the police for their conscious participation in power crimes of the ‘Free Market’ Revolution.
My key finding from reading Seymour’s book, is that the ACT Party – which lectures individual responsibility, consumer choice, and market pricing – are actually closet Royalists!
Seymour gives the game away when he says ACT supports the treaty settlement process in part because its proper to return what “you take that is not yours, even (especially) if you’re the Government”.
But, Seymour fails to point out to his readers that Māori are receiving no more than 2% of the value of what land and resources and other property that was stolen, swindled or destroyed. And of that miniscule value, very little land has been returned. You would think a Pākehā boy with a Ngāpuhi great-grand mother in his whakapapa, and who claims that the ACT Party has come “full circle” and is now “the best party for Māori” would have a better grasp of colonial era history.
Yet, by their policies, words and record, it is clear the ACT Party People practice economic warfare with the Monarch’s full support, so long as they do not challenge ‘her’ outrageous claim that the New Zealand Realm is ‘her’ hereditary possession.
The Neo-Colonialist billionaire Mr Jennings should buy the Neo-Colonialist politician Mr Seymour a copy of Dame Claudia Orange’s imaginatively titled 1987 book, The Treaty of Waitangi for Christmas!
Closet Royalist ACT Party People
Not surprisingly, given their closet anti-free market Monarchic sycophancy, Seymour skirts the real ‘Real Problem’. It is not an elite Māori elevated to Tangata Whenua status, as he claims. It is that the British Monarchy maintains New Zealand as an imperial possession by the stealthy con-jobbers – such as the ACT Party and their political rivals – who help brain-wash Kiwis and Maoris to never question that we are enslaved in a voted dictatorship system subordinate to a sly Monarchic Crony Capitalist-Fascist-Technocracy, marketed as a democratic franchise.
For their closet Royalist loyalty, numerous ACT Party people, including founders Sir Roger Douglas and Sir Richard Prebble, their fraternal friends of the Business Roundtable including Sir Ron Trotter, Sir Roger Kerr and Sir Douglas Myers, and many ‘free market’ Shock Therapist Rich-Listers such as Sir Alan Gibbs, Sir Michael Faye and Sir David Richwhite were made Knights of the Realm of the Fourth British Empire.
To sum up, billionaire Stephen Jennings’ endorsement of David Seymour’s book – along with his pep-talks to the ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific – are those consistent with oligarchic wealth defense, or the vigilant approach of staving off threats to unrestrained wealth accumulation of the super-rich. As I show in “Part 4: The Elephant in Every Labour-Political Delivery Room is a Crying National Shame”, the purpose behind the political capture of New Zealand two major political parties by the far-right was to make this far-flung realm an experiment test lab for the world. New Zealanders were unwittingly cast guinea pigs for economic warfare shock treatments, in accordance with the ‘Shock Doctrine’, later identified more generally by Naomi Klein in her study of ‘free market’ policy shocks around the world.
It would be a total deal-breaker for New Zealanders if there were a critical awakening to the cunning condition of our enslavement.
Therefore, the only thing keeping the crisis-ridden New Zealand Tax Farm from dissenting into ‘rebellion’ is the crafty exploitation of the ‘Kiwi’ psyche as a laid-back, brainwashed Tax Flock. Thus, stage management of the spectacle of democracy is vital to the Pākehā-dominated ruling class, lest the Kiwi and Iwi Tax Flocks develop a big picture view of the root causes for this jurisdiction’s crisis-ridden condition.
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Source References:
[1] Mike Maloney. (2013). “The Biggest Scam In The History Of Mankind (Documentary) – Hidden Secrets of Money 4”. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0; SEE ALSO: “The Secret Of Oz” – The Truth Behind The Modern Financial System, And The Money-Political Complex” at: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/secret-oz-truth-behind-modern-financial-system-and-money-political-complex; Paul Grignon (2009). Money As Debt – Full Length Documentary. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvKjsIxT_8; Rowbotham, M. (1998). The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics, p. 4, 26. Charlbury, England: Jon Carpenter; Ross Ashcroft. (2012). Four Horsemen; The Global Financial Crisis. Renegade Films. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU; See also: An overview of the functions of money, and how money and credit are created in the NZ economy, examining the roles of the Reserve Bank and private sector banks. http://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/77033/overview-functions-money-and-how-money-and-credit-are-created-nz-economy-examining
[2 The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception. Nicky Hager (2006).
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[3] Nicky Hager (2006). The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Political Deception. p.225.
[4] Robert Barwick et al. (January-March, 1997). Her Majesty’s Mont Perelin Society assaults New Zealand, p. 6-11. In: Nazi ‘reforms’ rip apart New Zealand – Australia Next. The New Citizen Report. Vol.4, No. 7. Citizens Electoral Council, Australia.