Hi RobC.
Well first off capitalism is dead for all practice purposes. Which is a kind of abstract statement. In terms of Keynesian short term thinking all capitalism was used for is to say capitalism is better than communism and bash unions with. There fore transforming democratic societies into profit for shareholders. So let's be a bit more concrete. South Canterbury Finance Ltd was once New Zealand's 10th largest finance company. I'm quoting there Wikipedia page here. "On 7 December 2011, the Serious Fraud Office laid 21 charges against five individuals in respect of South Canterbury Finance. The charges relate to a variety of allegedly fraudulent transactions which have a total estimated value of approximately $1.7 billion. This includes an estimated $1.58 billion from the Crown Retail Deposits Guarantee Scheme.[17]" So South Canterbury finance was allowed to continue its fraudulent ways with crown funds. That's just a ridiculous way of making money. Alternatively the Crown could have bailed out the investor/shareholders directly. Instead of overwhelmingly bailing out creditors. But that's a different story.
As for Marx notions of long term planning neither Marx nor Keynes could have predicted the Poles melting so fast. Quite simply there is no capitalist price mechanism that can signal the poles are melting to the markets while government bail outs exist. Then we can argue about Marx's theories of the labour force and AI and automation puts a major dent in the whole notion of workers share of capital.
And these are serious problems capitalist economies are in crises about how to deal with. So capitalism has never been faced with a shrinking work force due to automation. When labour is no longer needed in the production of capital that is a huge problem for capitalism and democracy hasn't faced before.
Now I'm not talking about a total collapse. What I'm talking about are huge fissures in New Zealand's economy and the Global economy that decision makers do recognise but because of the scale and nature of the problems, just far to many can't identify the problem let alone understand the scale of it. And a lot of it are short term values where shareholders have to make as much profit as possible. So managers are incentivised to maximise profit over everything else. And this push for short term profit really only came to the fore in the 80's by Melton Freedmen, Thatcher, and Regan. Effectively dissolving the social contract our fore fathers work hard to create create. Now the next iteration of capitalism, Neoliberalism, and the reason this has been survivable up to this point is because no one has asked, is this all sustainable on a finite planet and can you have a price system that says the polls are melting. According to Trump and the Washington consensus that's a no. There fore Antartica doesn't melt in American minds. And this is what short termism is really butting up against. And that's what we are facing.
On a personal level I like to travel abroad and tick everything up on my credit, but when I go to repay the debt my little economy goes down abit. Now you multiply that by the number of workers and that has a deleterious effect on the environment so harmful to the prospects of future generations. So we are looking at the level of flows here. If the flows are sustainable then no problem. So there is debt servicing and the over all accumulation of debt and when you put the too together and ask is this sustainable and the answer is no! And it applies to government budgets as well (just not on the spending side because governments can bail out, ect.) similarly you can look at the flow of global warming, carbon and so on. And say if you add it to what's already there then it's not sustainable and this is were the short term thinking is unable to deal with this and you get unexpected shocks to the economy.
So if we had a goal or a target to aim for, I think the Brits experience in over coming WW2 have some valuable principals other countries can pick and choose from. But Basically the Brits spent a lot of money clawing there way out of the Bomb shelters, essentially. And it didn't mater how much was spent because every one was far to busy working. And this is the problem. We've lost our goal and it's a lot of what we all talk about. We only have to look at NZDF deployments to understand that we've lost our political goals or objectives. And it's true for governments, companies and individuals. It's something that's brought up as a huge national focus, but we keep losing focus. Far from political discourse harnessing the will to over come adversities we bitch about who gets to eat and who gets to serve. But we are waiting to see what kind of impending catastrophe emerges to get governments to act. So the expending environmental collapse should give us hope that it can rally supporters around it and focus our attention on achievable goals.
Far to often military funding looks at the bottom line instead of what's actually achievable. Along with mass production and AI eliminating a lot of the jobs that eliminate short term output then your not looking at the bottom line at all your kind of destroying short term outputs. As for peaceful transitions humans have never transitioned peacefully, ever. And I don't think automated transformation will be peaceful either and this is partly the classic article by Nick Hauner "The Pitchfork are Coming." And none of this is an argument of merit it's simply an argument to own stuff for the sake of it.
So the whole argument about governments just moving around and NZDF not having a goal, or at least being hooked onto Americas wars with no over all strategy for political objectives, just pales in comparison to our changing environment.
We should make it clear that people want to collaborate. And collaborate in ways that were never possible before. And infact people want to collaborate and do useful things which is something pro capitalists forces attempt to obscure.
I agree that New Zealand has a right to defend itself. And correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that's what international law says (Might be in the UN charter as well) so in general in international law no country has a right to defend it's self by force unless that country exhaust peaceful means. I don't see it as a means to get involved all the time just because NZDF couldn't get involved in Iraq 2003. Actually it shouldn't need saying that the U.S routinely organises military coups. As long as the U.S is involved wide spread public support for defence in New Zealand just isn't going to happen.
But this doesn't mean NZDF won't get involved. Because we get involved whether through 5EYES or the U.N. But our days of acting on the front lines are surly over. At least for the medium term. And this is in the back drop of the failure of capitalism and the need for stronger independent militaries all through ASEAN and Oceania. And well they won't stay strong for ever. (Just a guess here) but Australia probably had the force to brake a blockade in there region back in the 70's. A lot of that had to do with ASEAN having weaker militaries. Not true today. But it's taken a lot of effort on every ones part to chill relations to where it is today. Mean while every one has been building up there militaries pretty openly. And at the same time The ADF has declined a bit, they've learnt a lot but they to have had procurement issues, and probably have addressed those issues. This stuff doesn't happen over night. It happens for a reason. Because like New Zealand, Australia are very strict on immigration.
Now I don't have my hands on immigration controls. But I probably wouldn't let to many in myself. I was just a boy when the 2 millionth Kiwi was called out over the radio. I never thought we would come so close to 5 million population so soon. So we had to import an extra million or two million workers to keep up with employment demands. Now we must live with in those limits. But that is dangerous because foreigners see our lifestyles and they want to come to New Zealand. Far better they come with commerce than with the sword. And this is important.
Indonesia had a flare up with ISIS recently which is an odd development because Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world and they've been OK I guess for decades. But when you listen to some of the 18th century accounts of Muslim traders coming to Indonesia to trade spices and other things (maybe slaves) there homelands were relatively peaceful so there wasn't this huge push for Middle East oil. So they came to Indonesia in droves, brought there culture to open arms. Now that the Middle East is embroiled in western hegemony over oil and all the military "aid" that goes with it. The Middle East is a god dam turkey shoot. It's civil war over there and getting worse. I mean what ever the Saudis think they're up to with former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is scandalous -
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-lebanon-france-macron.html - and every one is just standing around puzzled about what to do. What I can't figure out is if the rise of Trump has some thing to do with all this or it's always been there in the background just nobody reported on it. But seeing as Trump actively avoids the media. Guess MSM has nothing better to do. But it is the reactions of citizens to invite immigrants with open arms that started the huge growth in Indonesian Muslim population. If they hadn't been invited with open arms Indonesia surly wouldn't be 87.2% Muslim. So it is the way immigrants are treated on arrival that determinants how radicalised migrants become. None of these guys facing pretty desperate living conditions in there place of origin want to face losing there chance at a spot in a first world country. Things are happening fast. Faster than any one can react. And NZDF is woefully under prepared and underfunded to even deal with even the tiniest bit of all this.
Now the only course of action right now is for The Minister of Defence RM to work with in the frame work of NZFirst Defence and Veterans Affairs Policy that probably got him the job in the first place. But most importantly if things start to come off the wheels then then us here at DT need to make that clear.
