Amy Chua sees her America as a "super group", in that it does not expect people to discard their "sub group". To be American is to accept certain values. She compares it to Rome, which had the same ethic. At least that's the theory. To accept the validity of this interpretation you have to overlook stuff like the slavery of African Americans and the genocide of Native Americans. Never the less we can see Trump as Nero, tweeting as the world burns. But the distinction remains: other countries, particularly those which are monocultural, have tended to define themselves through nationality rather than values. .

Yet despite the scepticism which "super group" America might evoke, you can agree with the ideal. America and its founding documents promoted universal ideals like freedom, equality (under the law) and peace. Chua would like her compatriots to take these values seriously, which they are certainly not doing. Within this ethic the individual and the community can be valued as equal aspirations. Isn't that how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have seen things? Isn't this what we mean when we talk of "society"?

Chua's survey begins and ends with America. In between she looks at some other places which - with a lot of American help - have never either sought or achieved their own "super group" or society. Part of the reason America has failed so persistently in its foreign relations is the perhaps ironic result of its own high-minded mythology. On the city on the hill all the exuberant patriotism has meant that the rest of the world, the old world, does not count for much.

American misunderstanding of foreigners has always been extensive and astonishing. Despite having the world's deepest intelligence and financial resources - like the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and all the richly paid experts - the USA consistently gets things wrong. And in the most obvious ways.

Vietnam

In the last half century Vietnam and the Middle East have been the obvious examples of Yank disasters. The US waged its long war on Vietnam based on the assumption that the Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communists) were part of a global commie conspiracy to take over the world, bit by devious bit. It was called the domino theory. Knock over one tile and the rest will topple, all the way to... New Zealand. In reality, the Vietnamese were struggling for independence from France, which had no intention of leaving. It was a nationalist movement against imperialism and the guerrillas were not about to get into boats and set out for the Waitemata.

By themselves the Vietnamese could not credibly be accused of having such a reach, so it was said that they were pawns of China, dupes of the billion-strong Red Peril. Or was it the Yellow Peril? Either way, the prospect of such an Other was intended to alarm mum and dad America. Godless Communism was, at the same time, said to be a combined Russian-Chinese affair, another assumption which was never credible.

A shortcoming with this theory was the central fact that Vietnam had been dominated by China for centuries and wanted nothing less than to continue to swap one foreign master for another. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh said he would prefer to fight his own battles, thanks very much: "I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life". In addition, within Vietnam an ethnically Chinese business class, invisible to American eyes, was what Chua calls a "market dominant minority". When a numerically small group holds economic (and thereby also political) power, it is going to be resented.

Chua might well have pointed out that US blindness continued years after its first involvement. As he stumbled into the quagmire after a bloodied France had withdrawn, President Kennedy installed in this Buddhist land a puppet regime which was ostentatiously Catholic, this being the religion of a tiny Vietnamese elite who wanted to ape what they saw as sophisticated France.

Afghanistan & Iraq

If in Vietnam US policy was blind to the significance of (metaphorically) tribal nationality, ethnicity, religion and class, in the Middle East confusions are (literally and endlessly) tribal in nature. In Afghanistan the Pashtuns have historically been dominant but after the Soviet Union got involved there, minority tribes took power, so majority resentment created the Taliban. Neighbouring Punjabis in Pakistan are also mostly Pashtun, which is a big part of why the Americans and their Afghan clients find the rugged border so hard to control. Chua points out that the Taliban has provided an outlet for the lowest socio-economic groups in Afghanistan, especially in more rural and remote areas.

In Iraq a variation on this theme has played out. Saddam Hussein, the dictator who the US and the UK killed because he had those non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, was another despot from a minority grouping, in his case the Sunni Muslims, so the Shia majority enjoyed his ousting. In fiercely sectarian Iraq the passing of Saddam guaranteed that a certain amount of nastiness would ensue, but the US made matters worse by firing Saddam's Baathist army, causing a power vacuum which came to be filled by the former tyrant's trained soldiers trying to win power back by joining Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

These developments in turn induced the new rulers of Iraq to welcome fellow Shiite Iran, against whom they had not so long ago fought a long and pointless war. There's a domino for you. To a region where tribe and religion are paramount George Bush and his officials talked of "democracy" as if the warriors and the mullahs were about to declare themselves to be Republicans and Democrats and lay down their arms in favour of holding a series of Presidential primaries. Not merely misjudged, this cultural ignorance actually had the opposite effect. In a tribal society the party system, as in the US, legitimises and solidifies mutual antagonism, not a commitment to respect elections.

The America of George Bush shared some of this Islamic seeking of moral correctness. According to Chua, applicants for advisers' jobs were asked their views of Roe v Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court abortion ruling that obsesses the Republicans. They could have been asked about their knowledge of the Middle East but probably were not, as the number of advisers around Bush who spoke Arabic amounted to one.

Similar reports of a lack of empirical knowledge used to come from discussions about Vietnam - and the rest of the world. The power seekers in Washington have little direct experience, instead being guided by ideological abstractions. In the 1960s it was all about "Communism" and the "domino theory". In the more recent era, it was all about "democracy", which in turn meant "the market". Now we have Trumpery, when the President's impulse is to remove all informed and disinterested advice.

Venezuela: Pigmentocracy

If there is one foreign leader Trump should understand it could have been the late Hugo Chavez, the recent President of Venezuela. In his enthusiasm for random tweets and self-regarding television appearances Chavez came across as a sort of mirror of Trump, but despite these personality similarities the two could hardly have been more different. Trump is a white supremacist moron interested only in Mar a Lago vulgarity and excess; Chavez was a mixed-race champion of the dispossessed. Trump deploys populist rhetoric in order to bamboozle and divert while he further enriches the already rich; Chavez's populism was genuine.

Like Brazil, Venezuela has always advertised itself as having no colour bar. In reality its society has always been crudely racist and it was because of his Indian and African descent that Chavez incurred the wrath of the elites, who have always been obsessed with their supposedly racially pure Spanish ancestry (this paid no heed to the fact that Spanish people had for centuries carried the genes of several continents). Chua describes Venezuela as a "pigmentocracy" in which an extraordinary 16 ethnic/racial classifications range up and down the pecking order.

We all tend to foster national myths which bend reality to match the image of ourselves we like to project. In NZ it might be the All Blacks; in Venezuela it's all about Miss Venezuela. She has been Miss Universe more often that the beauty queens of any other country. Miss Venezuela is always racially "purely" white. One of them, billed as "the most perfect woman in the history of the universe", ran for President against the swarthy champion of the masses, but despite slogans such as "death to the monkey Chavez", she lost. Chavez had a measure of revenge when he renamed two oil tankers from commemorating Miss Venezuelas to Miss "Negras".

If Venezuela has been bedevilled by a crude racist tribalism, in America, evolved from a not too different past, language has not always caught up with more complex realities. Asked by a US poll whether discrimination against whites was as bad as discrimination against blacks an unsurprisingly large percentage of two thirds of working-class whites agreed, but so did 29% of blacks.

This is a lot higher than the response would have been from highly educated whites, the purveyors of political correctness. Unburdened by the mythologies of liberal arts graduates, Americans from more mainstream circles - whatever their ethnicity - experience discrimination as it actually exists. Chua's example of her own workplace could scarcely be more illustrative. Yale Law School bills itself triumphantly as now being "the most diverse in its history", yet last year of 200 entrants exactly one was from a poor white background.

Other comparable English-speaking countries - including, most obviously, New Zealand - would provide comparable data. As I write I hear of a potential donor in the UK who wanted to provide a hefty sum for poor white boys to enter top universities. This was refused on the grounds that it was "racist", a charge that would not be levelled against a demographic of any other hue, class or sex that a sponsor might seek to help.

Despite this victory of prejudice over knowledge, no other grouping is in such need as disadvantaged white males, in either the UK or the US. Another American survey asked young people if they thought the next generation would be better off than theirs. 62% of Latinos thought so, and so did 49% of blacks. For equivalent whites, whose life expectancy is actually dropping, the optimists staggered to a sad 24%. This 24% has been abandoned to the seductive rhetoric of Trumpism.

Chua provides another typical example of the confusion. Apparently, Bernie Sanders, the Senator campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination, once remarked of a colleague who was playing the race and gender cards that it was "not enough to say 'I'm a Latina, vote for me'". This, too, was deemed 'racist'. No. Referencing an ethnicity in order to make a point about educational opportunity or political advocacy is not really about 'race' at all.

The disparagement of males who are of European descent aids and abets - whether consciously or not - the neoliberal dismantling of the democratic Welfare State in as much as the 20th Century ethic of solidarity, as expressed through trade unions and the like, happened to be largely the property of white males. That is why some of the more frequent sneers at poor white men are made by rich white men.

Sin Of Group Thinking Which Categorises & Judges

Chua's unifying theme is that group thinking which categorises and judges is a sin shared by both sides of the political divide. The Rightist version might be overtly idiotic and nasty but the liberal version can invite ridicule. Chua looks at Facebook, where it is posted that there are over 50 gender designations. Such inventions come across as though intended to provoke a political-correctness-gone-mad response and rule out any possibility of a discussion, let alone a consensus that might lead to a truce in the culture wars. In this case, tribal hostilities over same sex marriage and the right to terminate a pregnancy come to mind. The result of such posturing: women and gays will continue to be threatened.

Conservatives are too often allowed to score points with all the "PC" gibes. What about reversing this tired conventional wisdom? Rightwing regimes and groupings have always been "PC", and nothing but PC, but are not thought of in this way because the term has existed only in recent decades. For reactionaries the use of the phrase as insult has been a way to resist the efforts to erase sexism, racism and other social injustices.

Progressives are necessarily in favour of social justice, including for people who are not like them, so they could be well advised to employ language which seeks not to categorise. Authoritarian outfits bestow power only on their group. That is why they exist. Men denied women; whites denied coloureds; rich denied poor. Religion A killed religion B. Family A killed family B. And so on, and on. Reaction is nothing but political correctness. It's the same with the related concept of identity, a fixation on which by progressives encourages Rightists to pose as the champions of universal values. In reality the authoritarians are all about identity and identity only, on belonging to the right tribe.

So, it would help if phrases referencing a desire for social justice could not be wielded as weapons against people based on their tribal affiliations. Multiple gender classifications in Ivy League universities and multiple racial classifications in Venezuelan despotisms are both bad ideas, even when the motivations of the classifiers might be opposite. The classifications of tribalism create violence, division and inequality. In the age of Mark Zuckerberg's social media and Trump's anti-social media, the forces of disintegration need no further help.

DARK WATERS
A Film By Todd Haynes

In Cincinnati, Ohio, Robert Bilott, the lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, has just been made a partner in a law firm that represents chemical companies when a rough farmer shambles in to the office and insists that Bilott represent him in a case to be brought against DuPont, the giant chemicals firm. So, our hero isn't keen, but it turns out that the farmer comes from his home town and knows his grandmother. Of course, in the end he takes the case.

As has been remarked by almost all critics, "Dark Waters" is part "Erin Brockovich" and part John Grisham. This is not at all to say the notion is hackneyed: in a story of the small people taking on the powerful and the corrupt, there's only one possible plot. After obstruction and denial, truth prevails. It's an American classic.

On the farm, which is downstream from a DuPont plant, cows are dying. The farmer has retained some of their gross deformities. At first the lawyer assumes DuPont will look into the matter and correct what would have been an accidental discharge. Instead, he finds that the pollution has been deliberate and prolonged, and it's not just a nearby farm that has been polluted. So have the whole town and its citizens.

The corporate need was huge because in creating Teflon it had created a chemical which ravaged all it touched. So, DuPont hid its existence. Then it deployed its billions to thwart justice. It took 16 years from the farmer's visit in 1998 to reach some sort of resolution. Fact checkers report that the film is accurate in all essential details. One appalling revelation is that DuPont experimented on humans after knowing the dangers of Teflon. These days Teflon is produced without the killer concoction.

A Company State

The action is set in West Virginia and Ohio, but DuPont's HQ is in Delaware. Ralph Nader, veteran Presidential candidate for decades as a critic of orthodoxy, used to call Delaware the "company state". As a small state hosting a big corporation like DuPont, its Government was long used to accommodating capital. On the main street in Delaware's main city neighbouring DuPont-owned buildings housed a luxury hotel, a bank, and law firms. For many years a DuPont was the state's top politician. The company owned the two biggest newspapers. Company towns are common enough, but, yes, this is a company state.

Relying largely on coal mining, West Virginia has, like Delaware, always been much put upon by the powerful. When our hero is identified as having grown up there, his boss wisecracks about it. The company town was never going to challenge its main employer, but neither would the Federal Government intervene, not when the state's Senator between 1973 and 2009 was Joe Biden.

It was Biden's record as an accommodator of banking interests that Nader was thinking about. During Biden's watch, Delaware was home to twice as many incorporated companies as there were people. It is known as the champion of deregulation, a place which, as one tax policy watching group put it, asked corporations for less than you'd need when "applying for a library card".

When Joe's eight years as Barack Obama's Vice President are included, his tenure in Washington ran all through the 16 years that the film covers. So, it's a topical consideration, though for whatever reason, Bernie Sanders' attacks on Biden's record as a long-time friend of corporate interests have not been about a tie to big finance. No-one has accused Biden of involvement in the Teflon nastiness, but neither has anyone mentioned him as having tried to help fix the mess. Among all the rave reviews was one commenting that this fine film's failure to secure an Oscar nomination was "deeply disturbing". Are they saying that Hollywood is another company town?

WE HAVE BEEN HARMONISED
by Kai Strittmatter, Old Street Publishing, Exeter, UK, 2019

Big lies, the porkies that are impossible to believe, are there to intimidate. If a regime can get away with them, everyone has accepted that its' control is beyond challenge. In this revealing and timely look behind official China, Kai Strittmatter, a German who has lived there for some time, remarks on a conversation of an acquaintance. This observer, a Westerner, suggested that Government propaganda was too hackneyed to be effective. His Chinese interlocutor replied that that was not the point. "We can cover the walls with this stuff. Can you?"

But State power is so entrenched that it does not always have to be overt. The country knows what is OK and what isn't, so a direct revolt is unlikely. Strittmatter focuses on the Internet and computer technology, where China has become a dominant player. It used to be said that the Internet would make China into a democracy, but the opposite has happened. It's one of the main ways through which President Xi Jinping and his apparatus rule.

The rules are specific and censorship of discourse online is sure and immediate. It's happened largely since 2013, when Xi took power. A discussion online which the State dislikes will be defined as "rumour" - fake news. If it gets to be shared 500 times or if it receives 5,000 clicks, three years in jail could be your reward. The edict won't need to be enforced: celebrity bloggers went silent. There are many banned words and phrases. Some which Strittmatter cites include "accession", "emperor", "all hail the emperor", "don’t agree", "Animal Farm" and "Winnie the Pooh".

In one pioneering district a Police cloud captures medical histories, takeaway orders, courier deliveries, supermarket loyalty card numbers, methods of birth control, religious affiliations, online behaviour, flight and train journeys, GPS movements and coordinates, and biometric data, face, voice, fingerprints and DNA. In another area citizens' "abnormalities and trends" are sent daily to the Police.

This is justified on the grounds that the authorities can know in advance who might be a terrorist. Of course, actual terrorists are rarely the real concern. The system wants to root out people who do not have "normal thoughts". It is especially interested in itinerant workers and ethnic minorities, among which are "people who have extreme thoughts". This applies most obviously to the Muslims in the west of China, where millions are herded into concentration camps.

The Reach Of The State Is Astonishing.

One area has a compulsory app which connects to the Government and the "Honest Shanghai" app collects 5,198 separate pieces of information from each citizen. All these startup apps are due to be extended to the whole country in 2020. That's the stick. But increasingly it's the carrot that is dangled. The helmsman wants love, and he wants 1.4 billion conformists.

Thus, the Office of Creditworthiness has been set up to award points to the populace from 97 public authorities who are watching. For anti-social behaviour like letting your dog crap on the lawn or jaywalking you will lose five points. If you give, say, a calligraphy lesson in your apartment you gain five points. Once you attain 1,000 points you stand to be awarded as an "Honest Family Role Model", but if you sink low enough you will be shamed: "Look at him. He's a B or a C. Shameful".

The best thing is to declare your devotion to the leader. There's nothing to lose and everything to gain. So when, for instance, the Party posted "Excellent speech. Clap for Xi Jinping" an ecstatic nation clapped one billion times before 24 hours had gone by. All this is how the lid is kept firmly down. Social pressure and rigid enforcement allow Xi to pose as benign. He is at the centre of as many sycophants as is Donald Trump and his ambition is for no-one to need to mention the stick, while they are gratefully munching their carrots.

His chances are good. Once pried from her screen the pedestrian knows she is being watched. Beijing now has the capacity to identify everyone through facial recognition technology within one second. That's the surface. Down below it might not be so harmonious. Strittmatter suggests that the dominating emotion in society as a whole is distrust, citing Hannah Arendt's remark about totalitarianism: "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies but rather that nobody believes anything any longer".

A traditional Chinese conceit is to place the country at the centre of the world, a habit that's common with powerful regimes. In Xi's case it is part nationalism, part personality cult and part mind control. A frequent gambit is to denigrate what he sees as his main rival, "Western" culture and ideology. This is necessarily tricky. An online poll in China indicated that the most favoured values were freedom, democracy, equality and individualism.

This is very much what you'd expect from a survey in Europe or America. It's "Western", very much the opposite of what the same people would say in public. As is the case almost everywhere, China's youth are into global pop culture, which is largely American. The lip service to Karl Marx is given to a philosophy which evolved from German culture. Marx with a Chinese characteristic (as Xi might phrase it) is rather less Hegelian. As expressed through a recent rap song, it goes "Yeah. You. You. You know/Communism is sweet like honey/I'm your Bruno Mars/You're my Venus, my dear Karl Marx". The inauthenticity goes right to Xi himself. He sent his daughter to Harvard.

Censorship works because the information technology (IT) does not need the big US corporations. For instance, China's Weibo with 460 million active users is bigger than Twitter, with 330 million. It's also because consumerism allows the population to trivialise itself. Strittmatter discusses an academic whose IT students found the banned Facebook, where they checked celebrity gossip.

The prof wanted them to search for some history or articles: "They look at me helplessly. Their thinking isn't joined up any more, they don't have any background knowledge. But they don't do it. They don't want to... They ignore reality. It's been made easy for them" (in one of my 2019 reviews I recommended the novel "Severance" by Ling Ma, a Chinese American. I do so again. Ma's young and future New Yorkers are just like this).

Some time back Neil Postman wrote "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Strittmatter quotes him here: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What (Aldous) Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no-one who wanted to read one". The prof adds a happier ending. Once the students got to know about sites like the New York Times they were very interested. Of course, they were.

Confucianism, Marxism & Leninism

Xi's claim that he and his Communist Party champion Confucius and Marx is ludicrous. In the history of philosophy few pairs could be less alike than them. Confucius is all about tradition and reverence for an unchanging order; Marx is all about change. Confucianism despised commerce; Marxism puts economic relations front and centre.

In China these days there are "Four Olds" which must be discarded: "old thinking, old culture, old habits, and old customs", an injunction which directly refutes the Confucian ideal. This doesn't deter the Communist Party, which likes to be seen as Confucian so it can refer to itself as having inherited The Mandate of Heaven from past millennia. A favourite is the concept of harmony. Strittmatter quotes an observation that "harmony is when ordinary people don't make a fuss".

Strittmatter has it that Xi "preaches Marx and practices Lenin". His repeated claim that Xi is a Leninist seems to be based on the primacy of the Party under both Xi and Lenin. He frequently gives rein to his deep dislike of all people and places associated with the word "Communism", but modern China has nothing beyond the ritualistic lies from its Government to connect it to either Marx or Lenin.

Strittmatter says that Xi's ascent was enabled by his anonymous background as a "technocrat". This, along with his advantaged background as the son of a leading Army man, meant he had few political enemies. In this he has more in common with Stalin (from a poor and remote background, but with a long time near the levers of power) than any other prominent Communist, a barb which Strittmatter does not jab. Certainly, the erosion of any independent agencies under Xi is more Stalin than Lenin.

Xi Similar To Trump

Xi is no Marx and no Lenin but he is something of a Trump. Both are bullies, aspiring to total control, Xi having restored the autocracy that existed 50 years ago in the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution; Trump tosses out all who don't bend the knee. Both despise concepts like the separation of powers and judicial independence, Xi because they are "Western", Trump because they are foundations of a responsible and responsive democracy.

Xi says he has been "chosen by history", while Trump, pointing to the heavens, has called himself "the chosen one". Xi made himself President for life, delighting Trump, who told him he was now "king" of China. Post-impeachment Trump declared his own such ambition. And, immediately relevant, China's "Great Firewall" was built to keep out the Westernite Internet, just as Trump's proposed border wall is to keep out Mexican rapists.

The attitude is not at all surprising. Strittmatter mentions what is a common theme from China watchers: nationalism has been fired up through a sense that China had been humiliated for centuries by foreigners. Clinton, as a wealthy American and former Secretary of State, is again the perfect scapegoat (one extraordinary detail: Japan is not to be forgiven for past misdeeds. We read that once 48 different TV crews were making anti-Japanese films at the same time).

At least a billion people in China can remember poverty, and will have little patience for what they see as a pampered liberalism. Strittmatter thinks that the pursuit of money is the one big (real) value there, and the prevailing ethic is one of personal responsibility. You're on your own. Get on and do it. Conservatives - and Xi's outfit is very conservative and very pragmatic - like to see the liberal emphasis on responsibility within a social context as phony.

From a distance, though, these attitudes can be seen as the rotten fruit of distrust. When all the big words are lies and the great man at the top is not really the supreme being everyone says he is, the result can only be a pandemic of hypocrisy and selfishness. This affliction can be tolerated now as the Government has succeeded in creating more wealth for more people than has occurred at any other time in world history. The pretending is not likely to end soon, certainly not when private lives are at risk of extinction. The one obvious question: will it last? What might make the wall come tumbling down? As Leonard Cohen reminded us: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in".

ROTTENOMICS
The Story Of New Zealand's Leaky Buildings Disaster,
by Peter Dyer, David Bateman Ltd, Auckland, 2019

The scale of the rot is alarming. Peter Dyer reckons that between 1985 and 2014 174,000 houses were "doomed to rot". His "conservative guess" is that the ultimate cost of fixing the mess will be $47 billion. Dyer was an engineer, so he has some practical background. He says he moved to New Zealand in 2004 and began delving into the leaky homes' debacle in 2011.This report is thorough and impassioned, the result of lots of research and interviews. His numbers can be trusted.

The immediate problem was legislation which replaced procedures which had been working reasonably well. A national compromise between the economy and the environment and between bosses and workers had always been tilted in favour the economy and the bosses, but the Rogernomes wanted more.

Rotten Rogernomics

It's about rottenomics because it's also about Rogernomics. In 1990, in the final months of the Lange/Douglas Labour government, a Building Bill was introduced in Parliament. It became law the next year, passed by the incoming National government led by Jim Bolger. The MPs were all gung ho. Dyer quotes one from each of the main parties to the effect that the legislation "enjoyed bipartisan" support but the new Act started the rot.

If Rogernomics was the direct cause of the failed buildings, NZ culture was another. We've never respected our natural environment. Understandably, Maori and early settlers saw trees as a resource, with no thought as to biodiversity values or the suitability of various timbers. Human habitation has always been a hazard for the bush.

Dyer reports that originally trees covered 80% of the country. By 1830 deliberately lit fires had reduced the cover to 55%, and by 1913, after decades of European settlement, only 20% of our native bush remained. The destruction of kauri forests was Amazonian in its recklessness, with huge fires being lit first to grow crops and later to extract gum, which was valued more than the timber itself.

The forests have been partially replaced by Californian radiata pine, favoured for framing because it is fast growing. A footnote tells us that the Government botanist, Alfred Cockayne, thought it to be ideal. As the son of Leonard Cockayne, NZ's great botanist, the person who taught the country to respect its native flora, it is safe to assume that Alfred knew as much as anyone about trees. A hundred years ago no-one could have foreseen what a pest pines might turn out to be. They should now. Radiata is a Rogernomic tree, fast and cheap, and with introduced hazardous properties, wilding its wanton way over the native landscape.

NZ used to be known as "the social laboratory of the world", a designation that was intended to be complimentary. The reputation resulted from the 1891-1912 Liberal government's pragmatism. In discussing King Dick Seddon's 1894 reforms which introduced a framework for negotiating industrial relations, Dyer cites the historian Keith Sinclair to the effect that the Industrial Conciliations and Arbitration Act was not just about labour relations.

It both reflected and helped forge society itself. The ethic of negotiation within a stable framework that sought to be fair was the prevailing ethic between the accession of the Liberals in the 1890s and the 1984 shock therapy. The ideal, of course, was not always attained, not by contemporary standards, but when it came to the conflicts between labour and capital, Governments saw themselves as being impartial. It was the age of the "fair go".

The 1991 Employment Contracts Act threw that out, claiming that trade unions had to go. Worker and boss were to negotiate contracts "freely" in an equal partnership. To a Bill Birch this might sound legally elegant but it overlooked the reality that the company had an enormous power advantage over its individual "contractors".

A favourite maxim of the world's Rogernomes was to the effect that if it's not broken, break it. The assault on society demanded this destruction. Dyer's account of how the houses rotted is a fitting symbol of the impulse, the breakdown in the long negotiated social compromise between the haves and the have nots being not the unfortunate by-product of economic needs but the whole point of the thing. Neoliberalism is conventionally said to be a response to a changed "reality". In truth it was a political war waged by corporations and their agents in high places against the status quo.

Rules to do with building to ensure accountability and consistency were thrown out and replaced by contracts with "disparate groups who have never met each other", whose interest was in sinking to the lowest possible price. Inspectors - the very term redolent of regulation and the nanny State - were not welcome. The new dispensation allowed for oversight by people who did not necessarily visit the sites they were responsible for. There were instead lots of "desktops".

Who Needs Facts When You've Got Ideology?

The politicians might have been unanimous in their enjoyed bipartisanship, but there is no evidence that they knew what they were talking about. Dyer suggests that there was no economic debate, no probing questions, no reports as to the need for the legislation. No research was offered and no studies were presented.

But who needs facts when you've got loads of slick suits dominating the media and the Cabinet room and the board rooms? Rogernomics' brave new world was imposed with endless talk of how "change agents" were among us. As the boring present was self-evidently a prison, the "change agents", flattered by the implication that they were socially progressive, could be enlisted in the service of the new order.

Few words suggest the old dispensation as surely as "clerk". A clerk was a time serving bureaucrat with no personality and no initiative. He - never she - sat in his cardigan at a desk filling sheets of paper. So, it suited the restructurers that councils had been administered by people called town clerks and that building sites were coordinated by a "clerk of works". In 1992 the Clerk of Works Repeal Act ended the Governmental registration of clerks of works. From then on anyone could call themselves a clerk of works just as anyone could promote themselves as an approved builder. Or, come to think of it, a financial adviser.

In place of the dreary old ways the country was promised it would be freed up to be "flexible". Business, self-evidently efficient and innovative, could now go about its' "lean and hungry" ways. These phrases have no meaning beyond signifying that there were to be no impediments to the fast money cowboys. It was all to be overseen by a Chief Executive Officer, a person who has the same responsibility that the town clerk once had - but at many times more money.

The triumph of image over reality manifested itself also in the preference for what were called Mediterranean buildings with flat roofs rather than the pitched roofs which take account of NZ's frequent rain. There used to be a Government department called the Ministry of Works, so it had to be abolished. Dyer makes a key point here. It went not just because it had accumulated experience and provided responsible organisation and policy coherence: it also "provided real advice... unlike the theoretical ideological nonsense" that farted out from Treasury.

Treasury occupies a special place in the theology of the Rogernomes as a sanctuary from which pure wisdom emanates, but most of its edicts are about no more than seeking the cheapest price. One recent example (not part of Dyer's remit) came when Treasury advised that Dunedin's Law Courts be rebuilt without their tower. This ludicrous suggestion was thankfully ignored and a special streetscape was retained. The point is that Treasury would have desecrated the city's heritage only because they wanted something cheaper. You don't need economists for that. A primary school pupil could do the job of telling us which dollar amount is the lowest.

All the lean and hungry change agents needed to be unshackled from those tiresome "compliance costs" which the clerks had imposed. Dyer gives the example of a developer who registered and dissolved 19 companies over 15 years. One of the companies went through seven names in 53 weeks. This situation was enabled by the Companies Act and its allowing for the "ring fencing" of debts and liabilities.

If trouble brewed the lean and hungry walked flexibly away from their responsibilities and started again. Somehow the country has not found the resolve to end the chaos and the politicians, originally keen as, are perhaps embarrassed by their previous naivete and find the issue best left alone. Who knows in what dangerous place a real debate about responsibility might end?

Politicians Have Never Renounced Rogernomics

Once publicity about all the rotting buildings had spread, and the Government had changed its name again, politicians sang a different tune: "What a mess! What a trail of incompetence and deceit... The Minister must be sacked. The chief executive... must go". That was the then-National Opposition Leader Bill English in 2002 (and, more recently, Bolger alleged that neoliberalism - Rogernomics - had "failed". Examples of what he should have done differently were not offered).

Around the same time, in 1991, Michael Cullen, who went on to become Minister of Finance in the 1999-2008 Helen Clark Labour government, offered his opinion of the Employment Contracts Act: it was "narrow, bigoted, stupid legislation, and it is also an extreme example of ideological obsession". Meanwhile, now, as I write, Clark is said to have regarded the "Rogernomics era" as something she "was striving to repudiate" (Jane Clifton, Listener, 15/2/20).

Which Prime Minister and which Minister of Finance has not been said to have repudiated Rogernomics? Douglas, of course, never has - his whole legacy lies in his clinging to the faith - and neither has Ruth Richardson, who, having imposed the Ruthanasian economy, left for lucrative engagements around the world telling others how to follow her example. And, of course, neither has Don Brash, the truest believer of all. But Bolger, Clark, English and Cullen ran Finance for 27 years and never managed to challenge a doctrine they have all claimed to despise.

Whether this is about hypocrisy or something else is up for debate. But it would help if at least one of our former politicians, now safely in retirement, would let us know. Without some sort of honesty and transparency, cynicism and conspiracy theories will fill the void. The "Rogernomics era" has never left us. Worse, current MPs have been allowed to relapse into what threatens to be an indefinite silence.

REVIEWS

- Greg Waite

CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY
by Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, United States, 2020

Thomas Piketty's 700 page "Capital In The 21st Century"* became an unlikely bestseller in 2013 because his analysis confirmed what we all felt - growing inequality and elite wealth were reaching new extremes. More specifically, his multi-nation dataset showed that returns on wealth are typically higher than income growth, so elite wealth and power will continue to grow unless governments constrain business by regulation and redistributive taxes as happened after the 1930s' Depression and WW2.

*Bryan Gould analysed Piketty's first book in great detail in Watchdog 136, September 2014, "Capitalism Produces Greater & Greater Inequality: Ever Increasing Concentration Of Wealth Among Owners Of Capital". Ed.

Now he has a new 1,232 (!) page book "Capital And Ideology" which was released in France in September 2019, with a hardback English translation released in March 2020. While we wait for an affordable paperback/e-release, this summary is based on published reviews of the French edition by Bloomberg, Guardian and Hertie School of Public Policy. "Capital And Ideology" reviews and debunks the ideas that have justified inequality down the ages, criticises traditional parties for their failure to redistribute wealth, and proposes new ways to make economies fairer.

The first proposal is to empower employees through a radical reform of corporate governance; the second is a massive redistribution of wealth and income through an overhaul of the tax system; the third, which could apply only to Europe or more ambitiously to the world, is a move to transnational federalism.

Specifics include employees having 50% of the seats on company boards; capping the voting power of large shareholders at 10%; "educational justice" as spending the same amount on each person's education; an individualised carbon tax to track each person's contribution to global heating and higher taxes to create a sustainable economy.

Wealth Taxes

But his main proposal is for wealth taxes. He wants to spread property to the bottom half of the population, who even in rich countries have never owned much. To do this, he says, requires redefining private property as "temporary and limited: you can enjoy it during your lifetime, in moderate quantities.

He proposes wealth taxes of 90 per cent on billionaires. From the proceeds, a country such as France could give each citizen a trust fund worth about €120,000 at age 25. Very high tax rates, he notes, didn't impede fast growth in the 1950-80 period.

According to Piketty, today's top 10% are way too wealthy throughout the world. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes have been abandoned. That pollical abandonment, he argues, is a better explanation for the rise of populism, Donald Trump and Brexit than globalisation or the historic xenophobia at the bottom of the social ladder.

In Piketty's view, parties of the Left could have prevented this but lost their way. Instead of representing workers and the middle class, they came to stand for the most educated part of society, the intellectual elite. Piketty sees inequality as a political choice, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. His aim is to provide a new programme for "egalitarian coalitions" and convince the Left that radically new policies are necessary today.

Unlike Marx, who wrote that all history "is the history of class struggles", Piketty believes it is "the history of the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice". To avoid doubt, he explains "the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, is truly autonomous". Piketty's focus is not on the radical political changes which would be necessary for such a huge policy shift - but that's fair enough, since we will have to work that out as we go

The final part of the book revolves around two tables that highlight his tax proposals.

Reforming Capitalism

Piketty proposes three different progressive taxes: a wealth tax, an inheritance tax, and an income tax. The proceeds of the first two, about 5% of gross domestic product (GDP), would finance a universal capital allocation whereby on her or his 25th birthday, every citizen would be endowed with 60% of the average wealth (or about $US130,000 in advanced countries). The third one would yield about 40% of GDP and finance public goods, social insurance, and a basic income for the poor.

These confiscatory taxes on wealth would also act to reduce the accumulation of permanent property and extreme wealth to support a new society where the balance between the wealthy elite and the wage-earning majority is more equal. But what if the rich don't want to pay these confiscatory tax rates and decide to emigrate?

First, hit them with an exit tax, Piketty says, and then work to establish a global justice system that makes it impossible to hide from expropriation anywhere. To that end, he proposes a supranational parliament comprised of members drawn from national legislatures. The latter would be elected under different campaign finance laws to those of today: Citizens would get vouchers of, say, €5 a year to give to their party of choice.

So, this is a very different vision for our brave new egalitarian world compared to old-style socialist State ownership. It's a capitalist economy which tries to balance the economic power of the rich and poor, since economic power translates into political power. Today's parties prefer "realistic" agendas - which clearly fail to tackle inequality and climate change.

Instead, democracies need new directions which are as ambitious as the welfare Keynesianism* of the 1960s or the small government, free market project of the 1980s, to shift the global corporate juggernaut. The political challenges are immense, but that's as it should be given that some form of change on this scale really is needed to create a more equal and environmentally sustainable future.

*John Maynard Keynes (1863 - 1946) advocated government spending on public works to stimulate the economy and provide employment. He was the most influential Western economist for several decades after World War 2, until he was supplanted by the neo-liberal monetarists. Ed.

For those who would like more detail, you can read the Hertie School of Public Policy review of Piketty's book here:

CAN DEMOCRACY WORK?
A Short History Of A Radical Idea From Ancient Athens To Our World
by James Miller, Oneworld, London, 2018

"Can Democracy Work?" is not the usual uncritical academic categorising. Author James Miller wrote this book to focus on radical democracy, not our going-through-the-motions voting which created today's unequal and unsustainable world. Miller, as a young anti-Vietnam War activist in the US in 1967, organised his local branch of Students for a Democratic Society. This was an early experiment in participatory democracy which was only partially successful, hardly surprising in a period of such rapid radicalisation against conservative post-WW2 America. And participatory democracy is the heart of this book.

The book opens with this quote from Walt Whitman: "We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted" (1870).

The story of democratic experiments is traced from ancient Greece to contemporary times, including revolutions in France (1789) and America (1776), 19th Century socialist uprisings in Europe, the early-20th Century revolution in Russia, and today's populist movements. In telling that story, the book stays lively by focusing on the colourful thinkers, activists, and political leaders who lived and breathed the democratic moment through history, from Pericles and Socrates in ancient Athens to US President Woodrow Wilson and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in the early 20th Century. Miller's message is that democracy is not just a fixed set of governing institutions, it is a way of life.

Although Athens is widely seen as the birthplace of modern democracy, Miller takes time to thoroughly unpack how democracy actually worked there, and it's quite different. A lottery system ensured direct participation in Government by all male citizens; not just in political decision-making but also as jurors, magistrates and tax collectors. Decision by consensus ensured that the wealthy and powerful had to debate with and respond to less advantaged citizens to get anything decided.

Miller's final chapter focuses on American democracy today. He participated in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, once again an experiment in direct participatory democracy, and the 2017 protests against Trump. He concludes optimistically that the ideal of democracy survives and is worth struggling for. Of course, it is one thing to organise say 500 people, and a much bigger project to reimagine a participatory machinery of national government. Difficult - but necessary.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? (Film/DVD)
by Astra Taylor, Zeitgeist Films, New York, 2018.

This documentary by Astra Taylor travels the world to discover why Trump and Brexit happened, discuss the state of democracy today and consider alternative versions of democracy. Taylor meets with many thinkers and activists who are troubled by the way democracy operates in their societies, prodding them to go beyond the usual platitudes.

Group discussions at the original sites of democracy in Athens are a key element of the film, as is discussion of ancient Greek democracy - which was participative rather than elective, making people work with other people who weren't like them. The aristocracy were forced to collaborate with the artisans because, if they didn't find common ground, nothing got decided or done.

By the end of the film, it's clear that a more satisfying form of democracy would be something like this. A more direct democracy may be possible - but only if many more of us take active steps for social change. Despite the huge power gap between corporations and activists, Taylor keeps asking why we accept this radically inegalitarian new world, and challenging us to do more to create real democracy.

Trailer:
Available from Zeitgeist Films: