Stealing – It’s in the Blood [updated]

Suzuki Samurai thinks about theft . . .
Let’s talk about politics – a word coming from the Greek word “Poly” (meaning “many), and “ticks” (meaning small “blood-sucking objects”).
I couldn’t help but laugh when I heard Hone Harawira on the radio yesterday. The “she’ll be right bro” audacity made me laugh only because that it reminded me how far this country has come in terms of expecting political abuse of power & waste.
Apparently it’s now funny to spend money that isn’t yours. In Hone’s case, a jaunt to Paris and a walk on the beach in Hawaii. Come to think of it, the whole press conference reminded me of the late great Billy T James’ skit parodying the “Lands For Bags” TV ad, Billy says, “Where did I get my bag? – I pinched it”! (Insert Maori giggle here)

Hone isn’t as funny as Billy, but. Hone the Maori really did “pinch it.” Sure it was legal –  he wuz entitled, bro!  -- but it’s still theft of other people’s money for what he called “a choice trip.”
Now I’ll give Hone some credit. He admitted that he took what he could, he made no apology for putting his hand in your pocket; he even made a prescient remark that said that most New Zealanders would have said, “good on you” – and sadly he’s probably right on that count.
Leaving aside Hone for a moment…
Even less funny are Rodney Hide, Roger Douglas, Chris Carter, & Bill English. (And various others I’ll leave out because that would take at least a week) These entities all been on the take too. Chris Carter is a member of the collectivist, socialist Labour Party, so we’d expect that kind of ‘damn the working man’ attitude from him anyway. Bill English, has asked us all to tighten our belts during the recession…but Sir Double Dipton doesn’t think he should – does anyone seriously think that he wanted to pay the money back because it was blatantly wrong, or did Mr Twenty-One Percent just do it to save his own hide?
Speaking of Hide, and his “I’m entitled” squealing mate Roger Douglas: These two have campaigned…excuse me…have made a career out of peddling the line that they are “Perk Busters,” “Waste Eliminators,” “Tax-payer Protectors” … Now both these gits are caught with their pants down, becoming the very same bludging, snouts-in the-trough, principle-bereft thieves they always claimed to be fighting against (ha, on our behalf)
For goodness’ sake, Rodney was the guy who helped Dave Henderson fight off the IRD; does anyone see the irony? Rodney is the guy you’d expect to be speaking up to slag off Hone; can anyone hear him bark?
The barking at Hone hasn’t come from his parliamentary colleagues.  It’s come from you lot – as it has to.
Dear reader, if you happen to see Hone in the street, ask him how choice his trip was at the expense of some poor, working, tax-paying Maori who is struggling to feed his whanau; ask him how choice it is that same poor Maori’s EFTPOS card just got declined at the supermarket; ask him how choice it is to say “I don’t give a shit” about the people who have to pick up his tab.
And if you happen to see Bill (and you can refrain from bruising your knuckles on his face), ask him how his belt tightening is going; ask him how his “entitlements” are looking, and think about how much money he’s taken of yours over the years when you are forced to tighten your belt and forgo a Christmas ham or holiday this year.
Ask Roger, if you stumble upon him, whether his “entitlements” should come out of your pocket; if you should be paying for books that you won’t read; and for holidays in London that you don’t get to enjoy.
And finally when you happen upon Rodney Hide, ask him how he can sleep at night knowing that good men like small business owner Ian Mutton killed himself because of being bullied by the IRD, the same IRD that collect tax so Rodney can go to weddings in London with his girlfriend. Ask him if he can face Ian’s poor surviving wife, who knows what it’s like to live without her husband, and their son – their son, who at 13 killed himself six months after his dad did due to the despair at losing his dad. Just bloody ask him what kind of twisted logic makes him the self-appointed doyenne of the working, taxpaying people of New Zealand.
Message for Rodney: you are the worst of the bunch I’ve just mentioned.  The baubles of office and the arrogance of political power have done you in. You have no claim, ever again, to be anything but another political parasite on the back of all of us!
Just another bloody politician – for whom stealing is in the blood.

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UPDATE: Who would have thought it.  Scratch a Racist Party MP, and what do you find?  A racist.  Says Hone HaHa in an email reply to someone involuntarily picking up the tab for his tip:

    “Gee Buddy, do you believe that white man bullshit too do you?
    "White motherfuckers have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries and all of a sudden you want me to play along with their puritanical bullshit."

Story, and more eimailery here.  And John Boy’s response?

    “Mr Key said Mr Harawira's language was not ‘appropriate.’ But he was sent a ‘very provocative email and that's what he responded to but I don't think that makes it right.’
    “He will leave the Maori Party to deal with him.”

Now that’s what I call cabinet discipline.

It’s the old us-against-them again, Guv

A guest post from the pens of . .

 “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
- H.L. Mencken

The ACC debacle shows again what happens when politics and business mix: something called group-eat-group. Every good government-created crisis needs a scapegoat – and having found this particular crisis this government has set one group up to take the rap.

With the economic crisis it’s executive salaries chosen to take the heat off the real perpetrators. With the ACC crisis, it’s bikers who’ve been set up as targets.

The bikers about to bear the enormous increase in road and rego fees are quite justifiably aggrieved; so are the rest of us…um, but you’d never know it would ya? Aside from the usual New Zealand way of “lay down and take it good and hard” whenever government decides we deserve it, there is a more sinister back issue at work here, the issue being how successfully governments are at setting people against each other. Let me explain what I mean.

First, since the government owns the monopoly shambles known as ACC, it therefore has no interest in providing a quality & affordable product. We can’t just reject their services and go elsewhere is if we don’t like what they’ve offered,  I f we don’t like it, tough!

This being so, it gives the minister in charge at the time near absolute power to raise prices, reduce services, and have you and me foot the bill when the grey-ones of the bureaucracy mess things up – messing things up, on this occasion, the tune of 4 billion dollars. That’s a four with nine noughts after it (a long row of zeroes being a suitable symbol for the thinking involved here).

Now, in the interests of being seen to be fair, the minister will split the tab between everyone; but of course it’s never ‘fair’ is it? When a product and its price is set by government decree rather than a market’s voluntary supply/demand principle, there’s always a gain for one man at the expense of another.  Governments like this. In fact, there’s nothing they like better than the chance to play one group off against another.

So emerging out of this particular mess we see the likes of the bikers getting themselves together to protest the unfairness of the new increased tax. The problem of course is that they are not opposed to government monopoly insurance cover, their grizzle is only that they have to pay what they consider is unfair. But if they had not been the ones so hard hit, and the tax increase had have been put on another group, then you’d not have heard a murmur from them.

Where were they when the truckers’ road user charges were peremptorily whacked up last year?  First they came for the truckers, after which group was set upon group as they successfully picked off one at a time.

I expect they – i.e., the bikers, whose turn it is to get it in the neck – will mount a wee protest which will, as is normal for New Zealanders who work for a living, fizzle away in confusion as they lose hope, and everyone else forgets who really caused the mess and joins in bagging the selfish motorcyclists.

And in the unlikely event that they are successful to any degree, the government will simply shift accede to some of their demands (thus making themselves look like the heroes) and shift the cost to another group, or across all of us.

In a better world, one in which the bikers recognised the common cause and were the beginning of a principle-based protest against state profligacy, incompetence, & malfeasance - an “enough is enough” protest if you will - and we all got in behind them, and we stuck the course with them, then in a world like that the government would perhaps be forced to save itself by doing the right thing: which is winding up this government-created disgrace.

The battle, you see, is not us against each other, it’s us against them. It’s not against what is ‘unfair’ to one group or other, it is all of us against the nanny state! The battle, in other words, is one of principle. 

Let’s get to it.

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