The 'glacial pace' of creeping fascism

Aotearoa has the chance to rethink what is important to us as a nation as we go to the polls in November.

Who we vote for matters. 

Who we elect can literally decide who of our elderly, immune compromised, disabled, neurodivergent, workers or just unlucky will live or die, will thrive or fail - lives and fates are decided by the government's policy decisions and how the it choses to allocate money and take it back through tax. 

Public servants, those who are incarcerated,  those in state care and those serving in our military and other agencies: their lives and wellbeing depend on the integrity and leadership of the Government of the day.

How well a Government cares for our collective wellbeing and shared assets, and how seriously they take Te Tiriti, our founding document, and uphold the laws, precedents and processes that make our democracy strong and robust is a mark of their respect for us and our nation.

The first term of the Luxon-led coalition has been a five alarm dumpster fire of failed leadership, conflicts of interest, cover ups and bad process.

Deliberately dismantling things easy to break and hard to fix and hiding unprecedented huge unsignalled changes to ownership and rights in a ‘coalition agreement’ reveals a spiteful, bad faith government that knows that it would not get a mandate if those things were put transparently to the electorate.

Under the current government landlords got richer while ordinary people paid with reduced access to various supports and a stalled economy as Nicole’s ill informed cuts ran the liquidity tank dry. Critics say it’s hard to see any reason for some cuts and policies but spite; they made so little sense socially or economically. 

The government has staffed key areas with non-expert think tank groomed operatives and ideologues who have been the key policy authors on new and amended legislation.

Hundreds of thousands of lives across health, education, public service and business have been hit by the coalition’s fast track donor priority asset stripping agenda that basically gives all the good bits to the donors to rent back to us and dismantles almost everything else.

Aotearoa has seen mass redundancies and layoffs, businesses closing their doors while tens of thousands have been driven overseas for work. 

The coalition made huge funding cuts to institutions, science, research and the arts while appointing non-qualified far-right fringe Atlas Network operatives representing vested interests to important key insider positions on advisory groups. Minister of Shit Sandwiches David Seymour worked for Atlas think tanks in Canada for five years and Nicola Willis has been a director ar the NZ Initiative among other links in the current Government.

The govt has also disestablished watchdogs and systemically limited or removed capacity for public redress as it has ignored, curtailed or perverted standard, good faith participatory processes.

There’s been evidence of improper handling of communications, cover ups to conceal conflicts of interest, industry written legislation going straight into bills which are then passed under urgency-  ignoring public input or omitting it - inserting significant donor friendly things at the last minute after the select committee process (which is largely ignored).

But the coalition policies to make Aotearoa more open to plundering by local and overseas donors are not unique to us. It’s part of a bigger global plan.

Manufacturing consent is a long term coordinated strategy. Corporate interests who think that they should have no social responsibility use fake science, fake lobby groups, paid actors and relentless press releases of ‘research’ and ’analysis’ trying to smear critics, shut down attempts to regulate them or get them to clean up damage or pollution.

In essence the global Atlas network evolved along with the US Koch affiliated ‘institutes’ to manufacture consent for libertarian rule, destroy the ‘New Deal’, ending socialism and all those pesky worker and environmental protections once and for all.

The idea was to propagate a rich sources of coordinated material and network of influencers to push it in order to make it look like legitimate opposition to regulations, hide evidence that might impact profits (smoking doesn’t cause cancer), socially implant certain narratives that help them avoid regulation (climate change is fake). 

‘Contesting the marketplace of ideas’ is the way they convince low information or wedge voters that ideas and evidence are the same thing. 

Through these think tanks the global neo-nazi movement trains and cultivate operatives which it deploys through its vast global network of ideologically-affiliated think tanks and partner organisations to implant in Governments as political candidates, start new think tanks, run departments or policy research at universities, start lobby groups, infiltrate non-profits, infiltrate boards, run for local government, seek out high level public service positions, become government consultants and advisors. 

It’s not an accident that the donor-interest driven assaults on good faith and legal precedent are so co-ordinated, relentless, and in some cases irreversibly destructive.

These ‘not for profit’ think tanks also have programmes of more public facing business-friendly meet and greets and fundraiser type events to cultivate mainstream legitimacy, and frequently publish coordinated policy ‘analysis’ pieces that amazingly align with other different organisations publishing analysis.

When a range of articles that say the same thing come from different places it further obscures the think tank connection. But they all have the same agenda. It’s like a techno-fascist box of chocolates and not every country eats them in the same order, so that makes it harder to see the patterns until it’s too late.

George Monbiot calls them junk tanks : ”A shadowy network of dark-money junktanks is delivering the same disastrous political package around the world.”

“A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?”

The reality is the libertarian policies are not popular. 

That is why it’s taking more and more money, and more violence, to hold their momentum, as handful of billionaires and rogue states are frenzy-buying up newspapers, TV stations, whole social media sites, just to try and force a metastasising capitalist neo-Nazi death spiral of predatory high tech surveillance, data centres, AI, Ponzi crypto and lawless pay-to-play states on us before anyone can stop it. 

Laws that put other people’s or public ‘greater good’ consideration over private whim or profit impinge on libertarian freedom so they pump elections full of money and rig the game in their endless favour.

Meanwhile tech lords and corporate mafia generate billions and trillions more in fake money, force an onslaught of data centres and AI everything on us - selling everyone’s stolen work back to them- while we are increasingly under every kind of surveillance among a huge renewable energy revolution and the emergence of autonomous kill robots and drones. What a time to be alive.

On our little planet Earth catastrophic fires and floods escalate. The hottest day or sea temperature ever recorded seems exceeded weekly.

The glacier breaking off in Nepal shows us 1 degree is the difference between water being solid and water being liquid. And what that temperature change looks like on the ground.

The world is running out of time to install better leadership.

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