liberation

Greek Political Travel

I'm off to Greece today for two weeks! If anyone has any advice on sites of political and historic significance - apart from the very obvious touristy ones - please let me know. I'm trying to put together a website of Political Travel - places for politicos to visit.

Email your Greek tips: edwards.bryce[at]gmail.com     (replace the [at] with @)

[political finance] Backdoor funding affects democracy

The NZ Herald published my opinion piece on why state funding of political parties is bad for democracy, retitled as Backdoor funding affects democracy. If this link doesn't work, the article can be read below.

Champions of the people

A very good Guardian opinion piece - Champions of the people - argues that unions are currently not very relevant, but as inequality increases they might become central to people's lives once again. There is also another Guardian summary, What is the state of the unions?, which says there is some optimism for British unions - union density is currently 19%, and in 2003 and 2005 this rose for the first time since the 1970s.

There is obviously some degree of re-energisation occuring in the New Zealand union movement - mainly in relation to unions serving those on low incomes. The Unite union is particularly impressive, and of course there is also a very important supermarket pay campaign, "Shelf Respect", in which workers have been locked out. For more info and ways to help, see: http://www.shelfrespect.org/ and the wikipedia report.

It's not the end of the world

Al Gore's film about climate change is out now in the UK. The leftwing environmental-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg says in response that It's not the end of the world and that Gore's apocalyptic claims are highly misleading. Lomborg is no climate change denier, but he disagrees with fatalist claims that global warming will be catastrophic and that addressing the change should be society's top priority. I think it's important to have an open mind about the whole debate, especially since so much of it is unknown at this stage. But I'm certainly more sympathetic to Lomborg's case than I am to Gore's. The most important point in the piece is this: 'According to UN estimates, for $75 billion a year - half the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol - we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on Earth.' The response to Lomborg's article will be interesting.

77% of EU citizens disapprove of Bush

The Economist reports that a survey of European public opinion revealed rising disapproval of George Bush's handling of international affairs. The survey, conducted by the German Marshall Fund, found that 77% of European Union citizens disapproved of the American president, up from 56% four years ago.

[political finance] State funding of political parties is bad for democracy

The current scandal over the Labour Party’s unlawful election spending has caused the Government to propose greater state funding of political parties, but in the opinion piece below I argue that politics in New Zealand would benefit from less rather than more state funding.

Profit-per-employee figures

New figures highlight the gap that exists between the wealth generated by large companies and the earnings of their workers. In the UK, recent research has shown that the 20 largest companies make an average of £96,000 pre-tax profit per employee. It would be interesting to see what the figures are in New Zealand. Matt McCarten has recently written about how SkyCity 'is in an extraordinary situation where staff members, who receive an average of $30,000 a year, are making their shareholders more than $40,000 each.'

Jobless numbers up

The jobless numbers are up in NZ from 151,000 last year to 161,000 in March 2006. So about 7% of the working population is currently unemployed. These figures come from the Department of Statistics, who count 'all those out of work and wanting a job'. According to Jim Delahunty, this differs from the official stats, which only count those that are unemployed if they meet a number of criteria. Roger Douglas had the counting method changed in 1985 to make the level of unemployment appear lower. Governments and the media continue to go along with this.

Australia’s 200 rich list records largest ever rise in wealth

Australia’s latest rich list shows a massive increase in the wealthy. The combined wealth of the richest 200 has increased by 22% in just one year. The number of billionaires has also jumped from 17 to 22. See here for more detail and analysis.

What has Labour done to support supermarket workers in their dispute?

The current industrial dispute in supermarkets is clearly one of the major union struggles of recent years. It's a still a strong possibility that these very low paid workers could lose, as they won't have the funds to withstand a protracted battle against a major Australasian company that made makes over a billion dollar profit each year. This raises the question of whether NZ unions should be building up strike funds instead of wasting money on the Labour Party. It should be obvious that Labour aren't particularly interested in the lot of such workers. What has Labour done to support workers in this dispute? Nothing of much relevance. Instead they've merely retained much of the anti-worker laws that were in the Employment Contracts Act - in particular the anti-strike provisions. This makes it particular clear that the Service and Food Workers Federation wasted the $240,000 they spent in support of Labour in the last election.

John Pilger: The return of people power

John Pilger's latest column on The Return of People Power outlines some of the popular resistance movements in action around the world. In particular he points to the fast growing mass resistance movements throughout Latin America that are now overshadowing the traditional parties. Also in Lebanon he points to the fact that a strong part in seeing off the invasion by Israel was the fact that civilians acted in defiance of the land invasion and returned from refugee camps to their southern Lebanon towns as the Israeli army advanced. Pilger says that 'Here in the west, as people abandon the political parties they once thought were theirs, there is much to learn from resistance movements'. He also refers to recent polls that show the sea-change in public opinion is happening in places like Britain, especially in regard to Blair and the Labour Party: 'No less than 80 per cent regard him as a liar; 82 per cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings; 72 per cent believe he has made this country a target.' And 'More than three-quarters of the population believe Brown and Blair have merely made the rich richer'.

Pilger also corrects some un-truths in the reporting of the resistance in Iraq:

In Iraq, in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July were directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent. In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning.

National more pragmatic

The National Party is clearly in moderating mode. A recent interview with Bill English on the Agenda TV programme (transcript here) shows that National still has problems differentiating themselves from Labour. Bill English had a lot of trouble pinpointing any principles of difference with labour. He also said that National is more pragmatic than it was 15 years ago and the party isn't setting out to prove a point about ideology.

Similarly, in the UK the Conservative Party is fast offloading many of their more repugnant and distinctive principles and policies. Yet just as Chris Trotter still thinks that National are secret extremists waiting to unlease armaggedon, there are many in the British Labour Party that believe an old extremist agenda lurks beneath the new Tory image. But leftist journalist John Harris wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian a few weeks ago in which he rightly suggests that attacks on David Cameron's inner Thatcher are a tactical dead end.