Apocalypse Paused (16% NZ underemployed)

Double Dip Warning
I’ve never been fully committed to the notion that we’re going to have a “double dip” — that the economy will slide back into recession. But it has been clear for a while that it’s a serious possibility, for two reasons. First, a large part of the growth we’ve had has been driven by the stimulus — but the stimulus has already had its maximum impact on the growth of GDP, will hit its maximum impact on the level of GDP in the middle of next year, and then will begin to fade out…
(The New York Times / Conscience of a Liberal Blog, Dec. 1, 2009, Paul Krugman)

When Krugman speaks, you should fucking listen. The W in recession will cause a massive global retraction and possible repeat of the kind of social malaise the Great Depression caused. When those intense economic conditions kill off people’s belief in democratic capitalism, they turn to other forms of legitimacy. We saw the rise of fascism and communism in the 30s due in part to the crushing impact of crippling economic conditions.

At 1pm on October 24th 1929, the vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney marched onto the stock exchange floor after a morning of devastating losses and purchased well over the sale price in front of everyone $20million dollars worth of US. Steel stock. He then went on to purchase General Electric, AT&T and other blue chip stocks spending $130million. His move funded by the wealthiest elites at the time was an attempt to insert confidence into a financial system on the verge of collapse. It worked. Until Monday 28th of October, four days later.

Ben Bernanke is a modern day Richard Whitney, the second the stimulus money dries up, the economy will crash again, or the economy will crash due to the immense stress from printing all that cash, the writing is on the wall and everyone seems to be in some type of delusion about it. What interests me is where the pressure will blow inside communities. Globalization protestors and environmental protestors will be one pressure point that will get increasingly radical as their middle class knowledge base gets angrier and angrier, but that’s the educated. Those not so bright will rush to the old scars, look at the rise of the BNP and the NZ connections on the BNP politician list, a couple of quiet unassuming NZers living here in NZ are fascist racists (that’s my polite term for the BNP).

Three Kiwis on far-right party's list
A detailed membership list for the far-right British National Party has been leaked, revealing that the white supremacist party's influence reaches as far as New Zealand. The list, which contains 16,000 names, many with contact details, was published on the website Wikileaks. Three New Zealanders appeared on the list.

We can see how the Government is preparing for the social malaise from economic collapse: vast new surveillance powers not just for the Police BUT MOST STATE DEPARTMENTS, the ability to take your DNA on mere arrest, the increasing prison population, the need to privatize it to keep feeding people into prison, the streamlining of the Court system so that you are judged and sentenced via remote, the broadening of what can de defined as ‘a gang’ (it’s 3 people) which then triggers surveillance powers and the ability to seize and freeze your assets.

The reality of what our real unemployment rate is also sobering. The Standard does a chilling analysis of how many NZers are actually out of work and kills any pretense that the consumer is going to spend our way out of a W recession….

Are you ‘really’ unemployed?
In New Zealand, Stats counts the underemployed and the people who have become ‘discouraged’ from seeking work but doesn’t add them to the count for the unemployment rate. When we do count them, the number of jobless people leaps from 150,000 to 375,000. The reality is that nearly 16% of Kiwis who want to work can’t find jobs or enough work, and the government is doing nothing about it. No wonder it’s something the government doesn’t like to talk about.



The challenge for liberal progressives will be to fight these events on all fronts to protect the civil rights and freedoms we have fought so long and hard for. That fight gets harder and harder as economic uncertainty caused by unregulated casino shock capitalism decimates communities. This period of pause is merely the time delay between the earthquake and the tsunami about to hit us.