A few good posts today that are worth a look if you missed them:
Chris Trotter reckons the police and the media are grossly underestimating the turnout at today’s hikoi.
If we assume lower Queen Street to be roughly a kilometre in length and about 30 metres wide we get an area of 30,000 square metres. Now, if every protester is assumed to occupy just one square metre of space as he or she moves up Queen Street that’s a maximum of 30,000 protesters, or, allowing for the odd gap, a minimum of 20,000.
Russel Norman has an excellent analysis of who’s driving the undemocratic Super City project and why in a guest post over at Public Address.
There is something awry in the state of Auckland – The Growth Machine is being constrained. That great Machine is feeling restricted. And those select few who make a whole lot of money from the Growth Machine – the property developers, the motorway builders, the corporate investors – are unhappy, very unhappy..
Colin Espiner wonders whether anyone else is feeling unnerved about rating agency Standard and Poors poring over the Budget before we’ve had a look.
The Government has admitted that English has had discussions with the ratings agencies… it also admitted that English would give a presentation to Standard and Poor’s about the content of the Budget, along with people from the Treasury.
Now, I do have a slight problem with that. Why are Treasury and English telling a London-based ratings agency what is in the Budget before we know – and before his own caucus knows?
And No Right Turn posts on the neoliberal myth that labour ‘flexibility’ (that’s code for taking rights away from workers and giving more power to employers) reduces unemployment.
In a flexible labour market, when times are tough, you can just sack people – so unemployment goes up. But where workers are protected by e.g. redundancy pay, sacking people can cost more money than would be saved, so unemployment is lower in a recession than in a flexible market.
Happy readin’.
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