Gillon, Holman, Brown - outstanding progressive results in Auckland

I have just got back in Auckland to the great news that two great progressive stalwarts, Grant Gillon and Tony Holman, have topped the polls in their ward for elections to the North Shore City Council.

Other wonderful results include Manukau City, where Len Brown massively defeated the right-wing candidate and is now the mayor. In the contest for mayor in Christchurch, Megan Woods got a fantastic 31,694 votes, the only competition to the new mayor Bob Parker, and in a very strong position to challenge in three years' time - assuming she isn't snapped up for Parliament beforehand.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10469781&pnum=0

Mike Lee is back on the Auckland Regional Council to protect our interests and Cathy Casey got an outstanding result to top the contestants in her ward for Auckland City Council. But overall the Citizens & Ratepayers (C&R) defeated the City Vision ticket in Auckland City because C&R has promised magic (i.e.) to both (1) reduce rates, while (2) simultaneously not reducing services!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10469745&pnum=0

It is 21st Century Magic. Within six months we should be able to see how they do it - it will provide really great insights into the programme being proposed for the entire country by National/ACT - big personal income tax cuts + no cuts to services.

The agenda, of course, involves greater overseas borrowing (by Council and by Government) and that means higher interest rates for every Kiwi business and household. It also involves asset sales (by Councils and by Government). And, finally, the Right-Wing black magic means higher fees and charges for services that most working families need. (They hope we won't notice - and certainly the Right Wing media won't highlight it).

What these politicians never talk about is population ageing or global climate change and why it is absolutely criminal generational theft for the current crop of politicians to go out on a borrowing spree to fund their election lolly give-aways.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4236568a6442.html

N.A.T.O. alliance in crisis due to Mr Bush's incoherent Iraq strategy

I have just got back from the Phillipines, where news of the political scrap between N.A.T.O. members Turkey and the United States was followed with interest.

The U.S., which unilaterally invaded Iraq on false pretences in 2003 and is the legally responsible power for hotbed of terrorism that Iraq has become in 2007, has warned Turkey against unilaterally sending in any of its own soldiers into Iraq.

The absurd irony of the U.S. invader warning others with real interests in Iraq (such as Turkey) not to themselves intervene military to protect their own particular interests is not lost on the people I met in the Philippines - a country which has paid its own massive toll at the hands of the United States military in the past.

Unlike the U.S. which came from across the oceans to invade on trumped up charges, the Turkish government has a real issue to contend with in Iraq, its next door neighbour. Turkey has acted in a brutal and repressive manner towards its own Kurdish minority and to Kurds across the region. It has done this with weaponry provided by the United States. However, the sad reality in 2007 is that Iraq is a lawless disaster zone in which extremist Sunni fundamentalist groups like al-Qaeda are thriving for the first time in Iraqi history. Northern Iraq has also become, according to Turkey, a base for Kurdish fighters seeking independence for the Kurdish provinces inside of Turkey where they are waging a war of national liberation.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E6C3560F-A490-4474-B236-11D323A0C64A.htm

The BBC, CNN and other international TV stations that broadcast into Manila hilariously report U.S. government spokespeople warning Turkey not to unilaterally attack Iraq in deadpan seriousness, never dwelling for a moment on how absurd such pronouncements are given that the current U.S. government has by its own unilateralist behaviour given the greenlight to every government in the region to similarly contemplate breaking international law.
Neither is the international media really capturing the historic significance of what we are actually witnessing.
What we are witnessing is the current U.S. government's incoherent Iraq policies unravelling. The policy is now seriously undermining the N.A.T.O. alliance which for 60 years was a primary vehicle for the exercise of U.S. military and political power in the world. .
http://mondediplo.com/2007/10/04empire

The Philippines has experience of genocide (1899-1913)

The people of the Philipines, of course, have a lot of experience in the human toll of being invaded and occupied by the United States.

The First Philippine Republic was attacked by U.S. military forces and put up an historic struggle between 1899 and 1913 to resist U.S. occupation. Official U.S. propaganda at the time was all about warning Spain and Japan to not attack the Philippines and about the criminal terrorists that resisted the invasion. ( i.e. the actual people of the country).

The U.S. conquest of the Philippines, including its Muslim regions in the south, resulted in the death of up to 1.4 million (out of a total population at the time of seven million at the time).

It would be great if the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in memory of the genocide in its former East Asian colony (it is expected soon to recognise the genocide of Armenians inside of Turkey in 1915. An estimated 1.5 million Christians including Assyrians, Greek Orthodox and Armenians died in the wake of the Galipolli campaign duing World War I when important elements in the then Turkish Ottoman Empire leadership criminally condemned the empire's indigenous Christian communities for being 'sympathetic' to Turkey's enemies in that war (i.e. being pro-Russian and pro-French).

The Philippines lacks economic development strategy

I was amazed by the stories I heard in the Philippines not only about the period of U.S. invasion and occupation, but the period after World War II when it had won independence but when its politics was little more than an expression of a U.S. proxy in the conflict with Russia and China in the region.

The CEO of a television channel distributor in Manila that I talked with at length, for example, bemoaned the fact that the Philippines stagnated terribly under U.S.-supported dictator Macos when the country was corruptly run and economic and social development were unheard of.
Compared with many of its neighbours, the Phillipines for most of its people has gone backwards economically and socially over the decades. It is painful for people in Manila and other towns and cities in the Phillipines to contemplate how dynamic neighbouring societies are such as Thailand and Malaysia and even Viet Nam compared with their own country's performance.

Whereas those countries are now reaping the benefits of a few decades of public investment in their infrastructures and industries and the retention of their strategic national assets, many Filippinos I met cringe in shame at the stagnation of their own country where a wealthy elite has continued to fatten itself at the expense of the overwhelming majority of people and is considered a "key ally"of U.S. policy-making in the region.

While other East Asian countries invested in their infrastructures and in education, the Philippines was run by the Marcos family and their cronies and the international companies to which they granted large favours so the education, health and housing of people was "left to the market."

This privatised economy where the rich pay little if any tax and borrowing is carried out on a large scale to pay the national debt still carries on in the Marcos way, despite the fall of Marcos

I reflected on this when discussing New Zealand with an expat in Hong Kong who told me that the Labour-Progressive government was "hoarding" the surplus to no purposeful end and that our precious national assets should be handed to the private sector along with large tax cuts for those who get the assets.

If we want to become like the Philippines I told him that is exactly the recipe we would return to - and that it is indeed the recipe of the National Party.

The Treasury has just reported that the government recorded a cash surplus of $2.6 billion in the financial year ended June 30, 2007, with about $1.7 billion of that currently built into Treasury existing spending forecasts - i.e. it is already allocated to new initiatives.

Progressives, like a majority of New Zealanders, can think of lots of public good investments that that one-off $900 million cash surplus could be used for - like assisting more low income families to get into their own homes or to better equip our public schools and hospitals.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10469764

But totally contrary to the lies of the National Party and their inumerate media cheer-leaders, that does not mean that in a world of population ageing and climate change that there is $900 million extra available next year, the year after and the year after tax for indiscriminate personal income tax rate reductions which, to have any impact, would cost upward of $2 billion a year each year for ever into the future.

The real reason the Right Wingers want to cut personal tax rates is because they want to starve society of the ability to invest properly in our infrastructure, our hospitals and schools and our people's housing. They'd just love the Phillipines.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0710/S00141.htm

ENDS

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