THE TRUE ECONOMY

“False Economy: the high cost of a low wage economy,” is the banner under which Jan Logie and Denise Roche, Green Party MPs, are touring nationwide to discuss the impact of the Government's policy reforms and funding cuts on community organisations and communities. They started in Invercargill on March 6^th and were in Kaitāia last Tuesday.  The meetings are based on a series of fast-paced 5-minute presentations from those representing workers, beneficiaries, women, people with disabilities, people affected by mental health issues, the Pasifika community and Māori. 

In Kaitāia I was one of the presenters and my message was that the economy isn’t false at all.  Rather it is a true reflection of the fascist states and global corporates that are running it.

A fascist state is one that steals the wealth generated off the industry and resources of its people, then redistributes that wealth to an idle, unproductive class of parasites; i.e. the global corporates that move at will across borders seeking tame governments who will change labour laws, offer tax breaks, and do whatever the corporates require to do business in their countries.

To illustrate, I went to the meeting in clothes and shoes designed by New Zealanders, Americans and Europeans.  But every item had been made in China by garment workers paid an average of fifty cents an hour.  Although that is hardly a living wage, global corporates require it to be so.

In order to run their true economy the corporates also require formal collusion between key private sectors and various arms of the state to dumb-down, distract, tempt, frighten and silence people into becoming compliant work units who happily consume while employed, and contentedly retrain or relocate when they become surplus to corporate requirements.

My whānau and hapū have long maintained our mana motuhake and manaaki for all those who came to our lands to find a home.  But the apparatuses by which we do that have steadily been eroded or removed by the greed of global corporates and the faithlessness of a fascist state.  Iwi corporates who have ceded their sovereignty to that state in deeds of settlement are now steadily replacing us.

Our interests, when properly organized and channeled, are not those of the corporates or the state.  The key to undoing any power they try to assert or maintain over us lies in educating ourselves and our children to think critically, to use the media more for information than entertainment, to resist debt and all other addictive substances, to fear nothing and no-one, and to speak the truth about the state of things as they really are. 

Can we do it?  Yes, if we want to enough.  Will we do it?  I don’t know.  I do know that if whānau and hapū don’t do it, then the outlook for the rest of the citizenry is poor.  However I retain hope, and I look forward to a time when the true economy is not one run by corporates or states.