The Stealth Privatization Agenda

What we are currently seeing in NZ is John Key spending the smile and wave capital he built up for almost three years to push through some of the most draconian social policy and wholesale flogging off of our asset's this country has seen since Rodger Douglas made his love sonnets to Milton Friedman actual economic law in the 1980's.

John Key is to NZ that rags to riches aspirational piece of cheese that is forever out of reach of the mouse forever running on the mousewheel, he is charming his way through a stealth privatization agenda. On the one hand aknowledging that he is going to the election to boldly seek a mandate, but on the other hand, not actually specifying how deep that privatization agenda runs and as such he comes across as decisive without ever actually explaining to any of us what his dicisiveness will actually mean as he seeks to privatize Government social services.

NZ Herald Chief Political commentator John Armstrong called it correctly last weekend when he was writing about how National have to date been able to keep the true depth of the Welfare reforms from public attention...

"Where this revolution really shows itself is in the document's push for much greater private sector involvement in state agencies' delivery of public services".

This beneficiary bash reform is really the private sector corporatization of welfare services, this Government is actually trying to abscond from its social obligations and responsibilities by handing Welfare over to corporations the way they have absconded from their responsibilities in prisons by handing them over to private prison company SERCO who have a terrible record overseas of prisoner abuse. SERCO are the guys who run the dreaded refugee camps in Australia for Christ's sake!

This crippling of the welfare state is cruelty as social police, it's Economic Darwinism. What point other than ideology, redneck knee jerks and corporate profit margins is served by forcing a mother back to work when their child is one? That's an infant, we KNOW from Gluckman's report that those early years are the essential part in the development of that child, separating mother and child at that age is not only spiteful, it's ultimately counter-productive when you look at the cost in social damage later on down the track.

You can tell that Adrian Roberts and Enid Ratahi Pryor, two representatives of corporate's sitting at the table of the ideologically stacked welfare razor gang table have had their views heard over everyone else's and this venemos attempt to privatize social services benefits them and their industry most.

Let's remind ourselves who was on this ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang?

As the ever brilliant Gordon Campbell points out, Peter Saunders, the former Director at the Centre for Independent Studies think tank in Sydney has been appointed as one of the experts the working group on welfare reform can call upon...

Saunders, if I can put this succinctly, is a nut job. He writes fiction as well as right wing opinion pieces for the press in Australia and Britain, even though it can be hard to tell the difference. Lets start with the opinion columns. In 1994, in his review of Charles Murray’s notorious book The Bell Curve on the alleged links between race and intelligence, Saunders concluded that social class, not race, was the real determinant of IQ

..so he claims poor people are just born dumb and blames social welfare for allowing more dumb/poor people to breed and in his downtime he writes hardcore Islamophobic fiction.

Oh he's a gem isn't he?

But it get's worse. Gordon also points out that National have also appointed members to this board who simply don't have any objectivity...

The welfare review panel, as has been widely noted, also includes Catherine Isaac (Judd) the former Act Party president. What also seems extraordinary is that some members of the working group – eg Adrian Roberts and Enid Ratahi Pryor – are also current contractors with Social Welfare. As such, they are involved in business relationships with the same state welfare system whose rules they are being asked to evaluate, with a view to change. How can they help to devise solutions to welfare dependency without being seen to be generating more business for their own enterprises? Answer: they can’t.

...so people with a vested interest in the privatization of welfare are the ones who will be advising the Government about the privatization of welfare, researched and supported by a Welfare hating, Islmaphobic fiction writer.

How will beneficiaries feel knowing Peter is making decisions on their future when he believes poor people are actually more stupid than rich people?

Other than Islamaphobic fiction writers who connect intelligence to wealth and advocate corporations run social welfare, who else is on this Welfare razor gang?

Surprise, surprise - the former president of ACT, Catherine Isaac. A day after the Welfare Working Group first met on April 30th, Roger Kerr, the Executive Director of the Business Roundtable published an opinion piece in the Dominion Post claiming unemployment is a political choice, as in the poor choose to be poor.

Roger rages against the welfare machine by claiming if only we dumped the minimum youth wage and weaken unions, then employers like him would hire and Ayn Rand would come back from the grave with Adam Smith and they will lay the foundations of a pure free market city state with a weirdly overt militaristic Police force.

The kicker is, Rodger Kerr is married to Catherine Isaac, he’s writing hard right send-the-kids-down-the-mine-to-work-social-policy the day after his wife’s first meeting for the Welfare Working Group.

Cough-cough

I could have saved us the million dollars spent on this ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang to give National the scare mongering bennie bash crap they wanted to hear...

Bludgers will be rorting the system
Bludgers will be causing cancer
Bludgers may be attracting aliens
Bludgers will be using your taxpayer dollars to buy booze and drugs as they rob you while you are out of your house while you are working hard to pay your mortgage and pay your bills and look after your kids and all these bludgers will want to do is piss on your mothers grave.

Etc etc etc, we have every button pushing welfare stereotype exploited mercilessly to make us angry enough to justify whatever draconian solution these corporate vultures vomit up.

One question though about forcing solo mothers, the crippled, the mentally unwell and the sick back to work - where are the jobs going to be in a 6.4% unemployment rate with the global economic crises proving to be as dangerous as the 1929 crash...

Credit rating threat 'more of a warning' - English
The downgrade of New Zealand's outlook from stable to negative reflected increasing concerns internationally about external debt rather than a worsening situation here, Finance Minister Bill English says.

...oh, so there won't be any jobs. I'm not sure implementing neoliberal low tax, deregulation free market dogma domestically will solve a global economic crises caused by neoliberal low tax, deregulation free market dogma.

The weakest and most vulnerable in society are being asked to do with less by an ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang using voodoo math to justify sending solo mothers, the ill and the crippled back to work because of a global economic crises caused by greedy corporates who treated Wall St like a casino.

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

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