New Zealand banks are making an obscene $6 billion profit during Covid! Why the left can’t answer
Record profit: New Zealand banks made more than $6 billion in 2021, KPMG report says
Despite battling the second year of a global pandemic, banks operating in New Zealand collectively made more than $6 billion in 2021, according to a KPMG report.
Its financial institutions performance survey of banks found net profits rose nearly 48% last year to $6.13 billion – the first time it topped the $6 billion mark. dollars since KPMG began monitoring the sector.
Once upon a time when the left focused more on class and economics, we would have had a plethora of responses to this madness.
The economic stress that TDB has been reporting for some time will affect everyone but the very wealthy…
A leading economist has a gloomy inflation outlook for the rest of the year saying “it’s not going away anytime soon” and could lead Kiwis to pay more on their mortgages.
…unfortunately, the entire movement is infected with a woke identity politics with no intellectual muscle beyond monitoring microaggressions and canceling people on Twitter.
The right is looking for recruits, the left is looking for traitors and right now the dangerous far right is winning. The violence of Dumb Lives Matter on the lawns of Parliament proved that.
Thanks to middle-class Marxists, the left has devoted more energy to signals of virtue than to hegemonic economic reform.
Look at this…
… In 2010, the 388 richest people owned more wealth than half of the total human population on Earth
In 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 people
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, there were only 26 people who owned more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And now, in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
That’s not democracy, that’s feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth!
Labor let us down for 4 years because they had no plan to scare the civil service into serving the public. They see the lumpenproletariat on the lawns of Parliament as an embarrassing reminder that they have not been transformational and therefore label all protesters as Nazis.
They need 5 Big Ideas from the Radical Center that do more than awaken virtue to challenge inequality and poverty.
1 – Tax on financial transactions – TAX BANKS!
Society needs money for social infrastructure and to quickly adapt to the climate crisis. It is unacceptable that citizens pay more taxes. A financial transaction tax set at 0.001 cent would apply to all speculators who trade and the banks that allow them to gamble. Hit businesses with this tax and the beauty is that it is unavoidable because every electronic financial transaction is recorded. This would see billions available each year and begin to push back corporate power.
2 – Use the Public Works Act to seize 90% of all golf courses in Auckland.
The housing crisis needs an immediate solution, not new empty promises. Under the Public Works Act, the central government is expected to seize 90% of Auckland’s golf courses and build a mix of state homes and small first-time owner/occupier homes using the best housing in environmental and urban design. To hell with golfers. We could solve homelessness, provide additional resources to these new communities while giving first-time home buyers immediate access to the housing market. Why not transform the privilege of golf into economic justice?
3 – Feed the damn children – all of them!
Not just unhealthy food bullshit, I’m talking about community gardening, local produce, parents being paid to come and help serve the most nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch in all schools that we can provide. Genuinely caring about our children and setting standards for what is healthiest for us. Starving children cannot learn, and taking that cost out of the pockets of poorer parents would do more to put money back in those pockets than any increase in welfare without being clawed back by TMS. We would create community in the schools, while providing healthy food for our children, while injecting money into the poorest parents. Make it universal.
4 – Breaking the supermarket duopoly with 30% state-owned competition
A new supermarket chain focused on better prices for consumers and producers with better conditions for workers is the very kind of market regulation New Zealanders are calling for.
5 – Free public transport
Want Aucklanders out of their cars? Make public transport free. Again, this would help the poor save money and force change by providing a huge incentive for people to get out of their dirty cars.
This government is failing in every indicator except protecting us from Covid, but that is not enough.
What is needed are big ideas with immediate payoffs that allow government to circumvent the public service and its fiefdoms.
Keeping Covid out is not enough. Those 200,000 children living in poverty, those 25,000 waiting for emergency housing, the 50,000 households living in poverty and the locked-out generations deserve better.
We need to be nicer to individuals and crueler to corporations.
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