Poverty Watch 19

23 comments on “Poverty Watch 19 ”

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1. Afewknowthetruth 1

   16 February 2013 at 4:16 pm

   At least NZers are not invited to eat horsemeat labelled as beef…….yet.
   • QoT 1.1

     16 February 2013 at 4:24 pm

     Nothing wrong with horsemeat, it’s the mis-labelling that people should be outraged by.
     • Draco T Bastard 1.1.1

       16 February 2013 at 6:28 pm

       Exactly.
     • rosy 1.1.2

       16 February 2013 at 10:53 pm

       Not only mislabelling, but the lack of knowledge by the food producers about what is in the food they’re selling and the failure of food safety controls.
       • fatty 1.1.2.1

         17 February 2013 at 8:57 am

         Good point Rosy…a complex web of untraceable meat and a deskilled workforce who have no reason to care for their job.
         Neoliberalism creates a race to the bottom…if horse meat is cheaper that week, then you look the other way and throw a few mares in the mincer.
2. karol 2

   16 February 2013 at 5:15 pm

   As long as it isn’t (insert name of meat) labelled as vegetarian.
3. Robert Atack 3

   16 February 2013 at 9:47 pm

   I keep saying we are past the age of growth, at some stage we are going back to the cave, from here to there is going to be bloody horrible, ‘we’ are going to see a reverse of what has happened in the last 200 – 500? years or so, all the atrocities man has subjected man to are going to come back, as we transcend, this plunge off the energy/resources cliff . As food becomes less available, and humans become surplus to requirements, you/your children will see more and more poverty, to the point of tripping over dead and dying people in the streets, or being tripped over.
   And just to add another nail to the coffin of this failed experiment, climate change is as good as runway now, we are heading into unknown temperatures, the only ‘known’ is mammals do not exists above certain temps, which the environment is fast heading beyond.
   We are like a DU tipped missile, we’ve hit the wall and are powering our way through it.

   It wouldn’t matter if John Key woke up tomorrow morning as Jesus Christ, and Gerry as Mother Teresa, nothing can stop what is unfolding
   Unfortunately with Key able to technically print 300 million a week in bullshit ‘borrowing’ they can keep the game going just that little bit longer, for them who ends up with the most toys winds, but we all die. Just a lot sooner than most of you and they recon.
   • The Al1en 3.1

     16 February 2013 at 10:08 pm

     Stephen Joyce has it all covered at the super ministry, just let him fix nova pay first before he gets on to the easy stuff.
   • Afewknowthetruth 3.2

     16 February 2013 at 11:24 pm

     Well said Robert. You could have noted that Labour set the ball rolling down the slippery slope to catastrophe for NZ by refusing to do anything to prepare for Peak Oil when there was still time to do so. Indeed, Labour is still deeply into denial of reality and continues to pretend the present system has a future, even as it all turns to custard. As are the Greens, of course.
   • blue leopard 3.3

     17 February 2013 at 10:15 am

     @ Robert Atack,

     ‘we’ are going to see a reverse of what has happened in the last 200 – 500? years or so, all the atrocities man has subjected man to are going to come back, as we transcend, this plunge off the energy/resources cliff .

     Unsure why you use future tense on some of your statements. We already are seeing a reversal and many atrocities.
     • Colonial Viper 3.3.1

       17 February 2013 at 10:27 am

       Exactly. I would say RA knows this – we are a civilisation far into overshoot and now suffering from energy depletion and climate change. By my estimates theere has been no real organic economic growth in the world for roughly the last 10 years, it’s been a bumpy plateau of an illusion held up by money printing and debt.

       And in the last 5-6 years, we have started hitting the downslope of the curve in earnest.

       And as the pie shrinks, the elites and the upper middle class are going to stop at nothing to prop up their lifestyle expectations and sense of entitlement.
       • Robert Atack 3.3.1.1

         17 February 2013 at 9:48 pm

         Just skim watched the below documentary, the Warsaw ghetto is where most cities are going to end up …. before they hit – The Road.

         Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film
         http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/12809/Warsaw-Ghetto-The-Unfinished-Film-Ch4
         The Warsaw Ghetto housed 440,000 Polish Jews and Roma during World War II. Typhus, starvation and random murders killed over 100,000 of the ghetto’s residents even before the Nazis began the massive deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp.

         Yet the Nazis created a mysterious propaganda film that juxtaposed meticulously staged scenes of Jews enjoying a life of luxury in the ghetto with other, chilling images that required no staging at all.

         After the war, filmmakers and museums – unaware of the deception – used images from the film as objective illustrations of life in the ghetto, which subsequently became engraved as historical truth.

         With contributions from ghetto survivors and one of the German cameramen, Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film reveals how the Nazis used the ghetto as a film set, the inhabitants as actors and the decaying bodies as exhibits, and examines how far we can trust historic images.

         http://www.channel4.com/programmes/warsaw-ghetto-the-unfinished-film

         The Road
         http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/
4. xtasy 4

   16 February 2013 at 11:26 pm

   Work or bloody benefits, it seems to be treated differently in Sweden, than it does here.

   NZ has joined the laissez faire, neo lib, neo capitalist, follow up Reagan, Thatcher and “Chicago Boys” social and economic systems, that also culminated in a socially minded, socialist president and government in Chile being overthrown and replaced by a bloody dictatorship under US favourite General Pinochet in 1973.

   The “Chicago Boys” and US capitalism reclaimed Chile, its mines and wealth, the regime killed or rather murdered about 3000 unwanted dissidents, and Pinochet got on with “the job”.

   In NZ it has not gone quite that far, but we have a dumbed down populace, the media is firmly in right wing, private control, “news” are just about crime, antisocial behaviour, the weather, accidents, celeb gossip, a few one-liners by increasingly irrelevant political actors, and deliver NO information, NO education and make the people feel like dumb, ignorant players in a game, where their role is nothing more of an irrelevant side spectator.

   So since Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson after that ruined this country, shifted a large section into generational hopelessness and poverty, we now have governments blame the victims for the deeds the perpetrators committed against them.

   How a disgustingly unjust, shameful society has NZ become?

   We now face welfare reforms punishing the poor even more, by forcing “social obligations”, drug testing, and many other sanctions on them, challenge the sick and disabled to look for jobs and compete with fit and healthy that cannot find work.

   For f*** sake, is this bloody real?

   Sack this damned government and send them into the mines on the West Coast (the PM and his ministers, and MPs) to earn a living through sweat and facing danger, so they learn what basic life down the bottom looks like.

   Shame on this government and NZ as a whole, that the public let all this happen and let John Key and his gang get away with division, hatred and marginalising so many.
   • blue leopard 4.1

     17 February 2013 at 10:02 am

     +1 @xtasy, you sum the issues up well.
   • Descendant Of Sssmith 4.2

     17 February 2013 at 9:59 pm

     Of course the links between Pinochet and New Zealand neoliberalism was very strong

     http://www.kiwipolitico.com/tag/pinochet/
     • xtasy 4.2.1

       17 February 2013 at 10:55 pm

       DoS: How very interesting, I did not even know that the present Chilean president’s father was a senior minister in a government under the Pinochet dictatorship!

       That article is an education and enlightenment, for sure!
5. Binders full of viper- women 5

   17 February 2013 at 7:21 am

   Ahh Sweden, Finland…. dig a little deeper and you might find that in some ways they are quite conservative.. not in a tory kind of way… just in a way that they probably wouldn’t have a situation we have of a 19 year old ‘father’ of 13 babies and children to different women and girls. I can’t see anything other than grinding poverty for those 13 kids 🙁
   • Draco T Bastard 5.1

     17 February 2013 at 9:04 am

     That would be because you that the father should provide everything rather than society helping those that belong to it.
     • The Al1en 5.1.1

       17 February 2013 at 9:06 am

       Indeed! Seems a shame to write off thirteen children before they’ve even got started.
   • blue leopard 5.2

     17 February 2013 at 10:00 am

     @ Binders full of viper-women
     Could you at least try and sound like you understand the subject?
     Please explain to me how a father fathering 13 babies is relevant to the problems that this post is describing? Are you suggesting that these 15-26 people are the source of all NZ’s poverty woes? I would be very interested to know how these 15-26 people have such an impact on the other 4 million plus?
     Thanks

     p.s. I suggest that you refer to “girls” as “young women” in future. Unless there was some divine intervention involved, it is humanly impossible for a “girl” to bear a child. Were you also not aware of that?
6. Robert Atack 6

   17 February 2013 at 9:44 am

   “Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that’ve long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.” – George Carlin
   • blue leopard 6.1

     17 February 2013 at 10:17 am

     Great quote Robert Atack, I guess that “the owners” don’t have too much cause for concern in NZ then.
7. blue leopard 7

   17 February 2013 at 10:08 am

   Great post Anthony, Sad yet very comprehensive.
   It appears that Nact are not very bright, and perhaps they can only grasp the concept of “making the graphs go up” and haven’t cottoned onto the fact that its good when some graphs charting statistics “go down”.

   😕 Nacts are graph zombies.

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