TALKING TRASH
The Corporate Playbook Of False Solutions To The Plastic Crisis
Changing Markets Foundation, September 2020. Free online

This earlier report supports Clapp's view that plastics are not just problematic because of end-of-life mismanagement. Virgin-plastic production is a major contributor to climate change, which will use up 10-15% of our entire carbon budget by 2050 at current rates of growth. Plastics are a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis, a public-health crisis and a crisis of accountability blended into one, say the authors based on investigation in over 15 countries across five continents. In the face of public pressure to address the unprecedented pollution crisis, the industry has obstructed and undermined proven legislative solutions. Not only have voluntary initiatives failed to contain the plastics crisis, they are a tactic to delay and derail progressive legislation with empty promises and false solutions.

The researchers analysed voluntary commitments from the ten biggest plastic polluters. After three decades, Coca-Cola bottles still contain only 10% recycled PET. Other companies pin our hopes on chemical ("advanced") recycling - "a false solution with not only a history of failing expectations but also severe climate and toxicity consequences". They analysed over 50 national and international group initiatives; some initiated by companies themselves, others spearheaded by Governments.

These mainly focused on products' recyclability and end-of-pipe solutions, such as clean-ups and educating consumers on recycling. Not only did commitments by signatories not go far enough, there was a lack of accountability through targets and reporting, or means of enforcement. "By lending credibility... (voluntary codes are) helping to construct a smokescreen of sustainability behind which plastic producers and consumer brands can continue to pump the world full of plastic unabated". Skyrocketing plastic production is expected to double over this decade.

Researchers found a "shocking overlap" between corporate participation in such initiatives to solve plastic pollution and lobby groups actively working to undermine ambitious legislation. Industry tactics fell into three categories: delay, distract and derail. A policy focus on the consumer or recycling distracts from producer responsibility. Legislation may be derailed by political influence, lobbying by affected industries or fake environmental groups, seeking exemptions and weak enforcement, or by legal challenges. Voluntary codes are among the delaying tactics, and proliferation of these over recent decades has done nothing to keep plastics out of our oceans. Or even, it seems from new research, out of the food chain and probably our brains.¹

Canadian environmentalists and toxicologists reported being harassed and intimidated by industry representatives at UN talks about a treaty to reduce plastics pollution in July 2025. They expressed concern that plastics polluters were exerting too much power, not just within the negotiations but within the UN Environment Programme itself. ²

Meanwhile, Back In Aotearoa

These books are a dispiriting read, and have destroyed my confidence in recycling. As I was reading them, in June 2025, the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) was consulting on possible amendments to our Waste Minimisation and Litter Acts, mainly about the waste levy. Informational webinars on this were provided not by MfE but by WasteMINZ, "the largest representative body of the waste, resource recovery and contaminated land sectors in New Zealand". An industry organisation?

True, Coca-Cola NZ and water bottlers for export aren't involved. WasteMINZ's Website suggests it includes some enthusiastic and well-intentioned people. But I am aware that waste collection and landfill management in New Zealand is dominated by two global waste companies. Waste Management is owned by the Chinese State and Chinese and Hong Kong investors.

Envirowaste is owned by Hong Kong-based, Caymans-registered CK Hutchison Holdings, which is a restructuring of plastics and real estate billionaire Li Ka-shing's Cheung Kong Group. In Kāpiti where I live, the Council has adopted Wellington Region's Waste Minimisation Plan, with initiatives like community education, safe battery disposal, and food waste reduction cooking classes. Flea bites on global elephants.

Need To Focus On Top Of The Cliff

The MfE's discussion document laid out a vision for a circular economy - along with nice Principles for waste reduction and some abstractly worded Priorities that I couldn't really understand. So much was omitted or insufficiently addressed. To achieve a circular economy and, in particular, e-waste recovery, we will need strong new policy, legislation and funding strategies.

At our landfills, we need to reject applications to burn waste or capture methane and recognise that aerobic composting of organic waste produces no methane - and many councils do this to garden or food waste that is separately collected. But mainly we need to focus on two top-of-the-cliff points:

• Designing out local waste has to start with what we import - how do we do that?
• Incentivising waste minimisation and separation at the point of collection by businesses and households, instead of incentivising a waste industry that makes its profits from volume.

Endnotes:

1. M. Zaraska, "Mind-Bending Material", New Scientist 10/5/25.
2. D. Carrington, "Total Infiltration: How Plastics Industry Swamped Vital Global Treaty Talks", Guardian, 23/7/25.

FREEDOM FOR CAPITAL, NOT PEOPLE
The Mont Pèlerin Society And The Origin Of The Neoliberal Monetary Order
Matthias Schmelzer (2025)

In January 2025, Dame Anne Salmond wrote a Newsroom¹ review of Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian's "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots Of The Populist Right" (Allen Lane, 2025, $54) and his earlier books "Globalists" and "Crack-up Capitalism". She read these as she prepared a submission on ACT's Regulatory Standards Bill, and began connecting "eerily familiar" dots between the post-war work of the Mont Pèlerin Society and what was now happening in Aotearoa New Zealand.

"As I read, lights began to flash. For the founders of neoliberal thought, freedom is for capital and investors, not ordinary people... Suddenly, the draft Regulatory Standards Bill, with its attempt to impose libertarian values on all New Zealanders, and to remove regulatory and legal constraints on private property and individual rights, began to make sense".

Noting the racist and imperial attitudes of these early neoliberalists, she traces a direct genealogy from the Austrian Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s to the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, the Atlas Foundation and other Rightwing think tanks in the US and UK, and their New Zealand affiliates the Taxpayers' Union and New Zealand Institute. She cites a 2021 Atlas Foundation newsletter in which our Taxpayers' Union says its aim is "to establish New Zealand as a pro-freedom policy laboratory". Another experiment like Rogernomics², but on racist steroids?

"For the founders of neoliberal thought, freedom is for capital and investors, not ordinary people."

Freedom For Capital, Not People

I'm not going to compete with Dame Anne's excellent review. There's also a great long review of "Hayek's Bastards" by Deakin University sociologist Christopher Pollard in The Conversation.³

Instead, in line with CAFCA's foreign investment kaupapa, I want to focus Mattias Schmelzer's book on the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin society and its views on international monetary policy. In my CAFCA-inspired reading programme, this book fits very neatly between Wolf Rosenberg's 1960s monetary policies supporting full employment, which I reviewed in Watchdog 169 (August 2025) and Maher and Acquanno's "Fall And Rise Of US Finance", reviewed below.

Schmelzer unpicks a decades-long debate among its members that, through their lobbying work, led to "a decisive point of departure for the neoliberal project of a deregulated world market". That decisive moment was August 1971, when President Nixon unilaterally suspended the US dollar's convertibility to gold, ending rather than reforming the Bretton Wood system that had regulated international money flows and trade, but protected post-war employment in "Western" countries. Currencies were "floated" and tariffs gradually removed to "free" global trade. However, in 2025, as China directs investment towards BRICS countries and Trump tosses tariff spanners into global trade, international monetary policy may be up for a rethink.

Mathias Schmelzer is an economic historian at the University of Flensberg (near the Danish border). He wrote "Freedom" in German at the time of the Global Financial Crash, from archival sources then newly available. Verso⁴ has now published it in English as "the definitive history of neoliberal thought". Schmelzer was the first to tell the full story of the Mont Pèlerin Society as a transnationally-organised network of market-liberal economists, intellectuals, publicists and businessmen whose mission was to renew liberalism and to counter Keynesian* and socialist policies (which they portrayed as "totalitarian").

Their tireless activism transformed the global economy, by promoting floating exchange rates and the deregulated financial markets that brought it the brink of collapse in 2008. * 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 monetarists. Ed.

The Impossibility Theorem

He begins with a widely accepted "impossibility theorem". Of the following policy objectives, two can be achieved simultaneously, but not all three: (i) fixed exchange rates; (ii) an autonomous monetary policy directed towards domestic goals such as stability, full employment or growth; and (iii) free international movement of capital. The pre-1914, Bretton Woods and neoliberal regimes each solved the trilemma differently.

From the late 1800s to 1914, the "classical gold standard" of the free trade era - (i) and (iii) above - followed the Bank of England's practice. Most industrialised countries established collateral requirements to back their respective national currencies with gold reserves (Europe 1871, United States and Japan 1879, often referred to as "convertibility"). Based on unwritten rules, these "gold standards" combined fixed exchange rates with the high capital mobility that underpinned empires. This collapsed during WW1 and efforts to reestablish it in the 1920s failed, leading to wildly fluctuating currencies, competitive devaluations and destabilising speculation resulting in the Great Depression, then WW2.

At the 1947 conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, post-war Governments declined to subordinate employment and welfare goals to monetary policy, and also rejected flexible exchange rates after the disastrous interwar experience. Instead, Governments agreed to control movements of capital, creating national central banks, the Intranational Monetary Fund as lender of last resort and the World Bank for reconstruction and development.

At the heart of the Bretton Woods Agreement was a system of fixed⁵ but adjustable exchange rates. National currencies were pegged against the US dollar as the main currency for world trade, with the dollar pegged to and guaranteed by US gold, at $US35 an ounce.⁶ In effect, the world's bank reserves were now centralised in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Bretton Woods established the US dollar (not Keynes' proposed bancor) as the international currency, and put the US Federal Reserve at the heart of global finance. That is, the Bretton Woods solution to the impossibility theorem was (i) and (ii). It departed decidedly from classic national gold standards - (i) and (iii) - and from free exchange rates - (not i), (not ii), just (iii). These were the two proposed reforms discussed and championed inside the Mont Pèlerin Society through the 1950s and 1960s.

"When Capitalism's Blood Congeals"

In 1938, 26 US and European intellectuals and economists met in Paris to discuss a new approach to classical economics which they agreed to call "neoliberalism". They held "a spectrum of positions that... share the common denominator of opting for the price mechanism and the market". The group was unable to meet again until 1947, as larger group now including publicists and politicians.

This second meeting, organised by economist Frederik van Hayek, was in Mont Pèlerin, near Lake Geneva, from which the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) took its name. Its purpose was to link economic schools together and strengthen scattered liberals, to provide a "rallying point for outnumbered troops". Its members, more than 300 by the 1960s, more than 1,100 in total, were disproportionately US and European economists and, even today, almost exclusively white males, says Schmelzer.

Von Hayek & Friedman

The aim of Frederick von Hayek* and other leading members, such as Chicago economist Milton Friedman**, was to renew conservative laissez-faire liberalism which had fallen into disrepute in the Depression and, secondly, to "roll back theoretically and practically the advances of collectivism". By this von Hayek meant not only socialism but widespread Keynesianism policies, including Roosevelt's New Deal. *Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), a reactionary economist who opposed the Welfare State and championed market forces. **Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the father of neo-liberal economics. Ed.

It was an invitation-only club that did not take political positions in public, so as to facilitate free, sometimes contentious, debate among members. As von Hayek wrote in 1949: "What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles". Hayek had been writing about the power of ideas and their dissemination since the 1930s, especially in relation to monetary questions.

Monetary policy was a key problem for emerging neoliberalism. The politics of currency were more generally a central economic concern in the late 1950s and 1960s. The MPS rejected currency and capital controls as "congealing the blood of capital", and sought to counteract Keynesian and democratically determined policy by means of an automatic⁷, market-driven mechanism.

But finding consensus across the neoliberal spectrum on the how of currency reform was difficult. The twin priorities of guaranteeing free movement of capital and pre-empting inflationary pressures dominated the debates of the MPS and of influential bankers. Schmelzer identifies the division between MPS members wanting a return to classic national gold standards and those arguing for floating exchange rates as reflecting, not so much rival economic schools or different nationalities, as different age cohorts - those who had experienced the hyperinflation of the 1920s and those who hadn't.

MPS elders also saw flexibilisation (adjustment) of exchange rates as Keynesian social planning; younger members were more willing to accept political realities. By the early 1960s, positions shifted and an ever-larger group - with Friedman the most vocal - pushed for a system of floating exchange rates, to bring about a liberalisation of international financial markets.

MPS conferences and social gatherings enabled neoliberals to "recharge their moral batteries", strengthening and refurbishing ideas. They then spread these through other networks, universities, thinktanks and economic advisory boards, reframing issues and setting agendas. In the early 1960s, MPS members set up the Bellagio Group, an international association that held 20 conferences attended by economists and central bankers.

Thinktanks in the US, UK and Germany were central to the promulgation of flexible exchange rate theory and to the ascendancy of its proponents. US examples are the American Economic Association and the American Enterprise Institute. In Germany, the Sachsverständigenrat (SVR) pressed for floating exchange rates to avoid "imported inflation".

In the UK, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Enoch Powell, spoke against fixed exchange rates at a 1968 MPS conference, and the MPS-associated Institute of Economic Affairs (IAS)⁸ was a strong influence on Margaret Thatcher. MPS members were "active in their attempts to influence monetary policy debates at the highest levels" - through publications (including an economics textbook), events, academic institutions, and through members becoming highly placed in Government circles. Schmelzer provides career sketches of 34 key MPS members in an appendix.

Resetting The Agenda

Through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Schmelzer writes, most economists were generally satisfied with Bretton Woods. It had "proven its value", although improvements were suggested. Floating exchange rates were almost universally rejected and serious consideration was no longer given to classic national gold standards. However, from 1957 an unregulated euro-dollar market "offered a bankers' dream" to circumvent regulations, standards and taxes.

In the late 1960s, the US's expansionary fiscal policy at home and inflationary funding of the Vietnam War meant foreign dollar reserves were three times the value of US gold reserves, with the IMF ensuring liquidity. This discrepancy undermined international confidence in the dollar. France dropped out of Bretton Woods and redeemed its US dollars in gold. Britain devalued pounds sterling by 14% against the dollar.⁶

There were calls to review and improve the Bretton Woods system. British Keynesian James Meade, for example, favoured more flexibility in order to maintain external balance. But Friedman and the MPS were advocating fully floating rates as part of getting rid of exchange, trade and capital movement controls all together.

The MPS remained "almost invisible" to the public until the 1980s, but its members had worked to shift a majority of economists, central and private bankers, prominent CEOs, national and international officials and key policy makers to its monetary policy views. Bankers were persuaded by the prospect of profitable new futures markets to hedge exchange risk. But the Governments of most industrialised countries (except Canada) remained hostile to monetary changes that could undermine full employment.

The MPS's strategy in the late 1960s was to narrow the debate to two contrasting options: the prospect of increasingly complex interventions requiring international coordination of monetary policies, or the alternative of "greater flexibility" in exchange rates. Nixon's Treasury economist Paul Volcker⁹ accepted Friedman's "idyllic picture of a benign world in which the natural operation of foreign exchange markets... automatically correct international disequilibrium. There would be no need for controls".

Nixon "Closes The Gold Window"

That neoliberals were responsible for Nixon's drastic monetary policy changes is well known, but not the number and roles of prominent MPS members - Friedman, Habeler, McCracken, Stein, Fellner, Wallis, Burns, Schulz. Friedman had argued that neoliberal change could best be achieved in a crisis situation (Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine") or directly following a change of Government - and Friedman and Habeler were already offering policy advice to Nixon, as well as to Congress.

Friedman was appointed to Nixon's economic advisory group in 1968, writing detailed proposals and even a post-Inauguration speech for Nixon to announce the end of Bretton Woods. Nixon did not immediately follow this advice, preferring "benign neglect" of the US trade deficit while continuing Keynesian measures to stimulate the domestic economy. But he did abolish capital controls, in April 1969.

At the beginning of the 1970s, however, the US balance of payments deteriorated more drastically. This triggered a flight from the dollar and an outflow of gold from the US, which then dropped in market value. The Government saw two options: international negotiations to reform the Keynes-inspired world monetary system, or try the neoliberal solution.

On 15 August 1971, without consulting the IMF, Nixon announced that the US would no longer convert US dollars into gold - at first temporarily, then permanently. This effectively ended Bretton Woods. In 1975, IMF Articles of Agreement between member countries legitimised and institutionalised flexible exchange rates. Floating exchange rates were the main prerequisite for the rapid dismantling of nearly all controls over global flows of capital.

Governments Were Lobbied, Then Pushed

This was perhaps the most significant consequence of the dissolution of Bretton Woods, says Scmletzer, as it led to an explosion of international financial markets. Trading in global foreign exchange alone soared from negligible in the 1970s to $US4.5 trillion in 2008 and $US7.5 trillion by 2022. Much of it speculative. (It was a panic capital flight from the Thai baht that triggered the Asian financial crisis in 1998, for example.)

Dramatic exchange fluctuations since the 1970s have often had no relation whatsoever to real economic conditions, reports Schmetzer. Moreover, he sees the MPS success on floating exchange rates as a significant precondition for the rise of neoliberal policies that have confronted Keynesianism, the welfare state and State control of the economy from the 1970s onwards.

So, the Western World didn't democratically elect to dive naked into the turbulent waters of deregulated global finance in 1971. Governments were lobbied, then pushed. New Zealand was one of the last, in 1985, to abandon its "magic square" of monetary regulation that balanced the trade deficit and protected employment. Schmelzer's investigation of MPS conferences, debates, publications, satellite organisations and political influence is forensic. It's a bit of a dry read. But I'm looking forward to reviewing his next co-authored work, "The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide To A World Beyond Capitalism".

Endnotes:

1. Anne Salmond: Hayek's bastards
2. J. Kelsey, "The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model For Structural Adjustment?" 1997.
3. "How the neoliberalism of 'Hayek's Bastards' changed the world - and fuelled the rise of the populist right", 12/8/25,
4. $45 at Unity Books, or already available for free on https://archive.org
5. To be maintained within 1% of a fixed rate.
6. In effect, centralising international reserves in Fort Knox, Kentucky. £NZ1 = £UK1 pegged to $US. In 1967 NZ decimalised $NZ2 = £UK1. In 1967 when UK devalued 14.5%, NZ devalued 19%. In 1985 Labour under Roger Douglas floated the $NZ and abolished controls of capital movements.
7. The origins of the current separation of reserve banks from Government and democratic interference.
8. IAS has advocated for a "hard Brexit", against climate "alarmism" and for privatisation of the National Health Service.
9. Later Chair of the Federal Reserve, 1979-87 and Chair of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, 2009-11.

THE FALL AND RISE OF AMERICAN FINANCE
From JP Morgan To BlackRock
Stephen Maher & Scott Aquanno, Verso 2024 ($47)

A Must-Read

This is a must-read on what US finance capital is up to - which affects us even down here. Or over there, if you are one of the Kiwis currently putting over $US67 billion into US share and bond markets via fintech platforms¹, instead of investments at home. It is excellent economic history, clearly explained.² Maher and Aquanno refute a common view that, over the neoliberal period, financialisation has "hollowed out" production.

Rather, it was key to restoring capitalism's profitability after the post-war boom ended in the 1970s. "Financialisation is not antagonistic to industry," they say. "Finance - both within and outside the non-financial firm - disciplines the extraction of surplus value, fosters competitiveness and facilitates the international circulation and valorisation of capital".

Since 2008, that continues in a new form. Giant financial management firms - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street - have replaced banks as the most powerful institutions in contemporary finance, accumulating ownership power on a scale never seen before, say the authors, and acting as central nodes in a vast economic network. They are collectively the largest or second largest shareholders in firms that comprise nearly 90% of total market capitalisation in the US economy, and play a highly active direct role in corporate management. From 2004 to 2009, State Street's assets under management (AUM) increased by 41%, Vanguard's by 78% and BlackRock's by 879%!

By 2022 BlackRock's AUM had reached $US10 trillion; $US12.6 trillion by 2025. Its power is reflected in a "special connection" with the State and successive Presidents. Maher and Aquanno describe the Big Three as "universal owners", managing the total capital of the United States - and reaching out globally. As Brett Christophers wrote, our everyday lives are now in the portfolios of property, utilities and infrastructure that they manage.³ The authors present the history of financialisation in four phases, examining financial and corporate power and the role played by the State in each phase. Transitions between these phases of capitalist development have been marked by crises.

Classic Finance Capital Period, 1880-1929

For this early period, the authors draw on Marx's (Vol.III) and Rudolf Hilferding's (1910) work on industrial development in respectively Britain and Germany. Embedded in and illustrated by their account of the US case is really useful discussion about different kinds of capital - their distinctions, interactions and roles in the industrial finance system, including how even speculative ("fictitious capital") market trading contributes liquidity for bankers and industrialists.

Briefly, it's the story of the intertwining and fusion of financial and industrial capital and their interests, with a strong role played by the State. US heavy industry developed and spread on the back of State-led projects such as railways, electrification and WW1. The National Banking Act 1863 required small and rural banks to deposit capital reserves with the large New York banks.

This increased the "money-capital"⁴ and credit the large banks could lend to industrial firms and the equity they could take in them; interlocking directorships allowed them to look after bank interests. From 1889 states allowed firms to operate nationally and the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act prompted the merger of cartels of firms into large corporations. This reduced transaction and capital mobility costs, increasing competition (and worker exploitation).

Competition between corporations is about attracting capital to the highest return, the authors argue, not about the number of firms. By the turn of the century, JP Morgan, with 72 seats on 112 of the largest US corporations, was at the centre of banking and industrial networks, enabling the management of risk and the capture of gains throughout the economy. Other people's money in bank deposits and small holdings in the expanding share markets contributed to both bank control and industrial growth. But not without repeated financial crises. In the panic of 1907, the Treasury effectively gave JP Morgan blank cheques to disperse liquidity to banks and raise further funds.

This led to the formation of a Federal Reserve ("the Fed") to hold banks' reserves, with the power to provide liquidity and credit, as well as to create State currency. To support the WW1 war effort, both private banks and the Fed bought US Treasury bonds, but subsequently purchasing Treasury bonds became the Fed's primary mechanism for generating currency - meaning its activities were now backed by the debt of the US State itself. "Fiscal policy therefore became integrated with monetary policy; and both were integrated with the private banking system".

As the large infrastructure projects and the war economy ended, banks pivoted their lending from long-term to speculative investors, leading to a massive share market bubble. From its 1929 peak, share prices dropped 90% by 1933, destroying capital, and a third of US banks collapsed. The impact spiralled outward to leave millions unemployed and destitute - including New Zealanders.

Managerialism And The New Deal State, 1930-1979

In 1933 and 1935, President Roosevelt reshaped financial capitalism by passing legislation that imposed a watertight separation between financial and industrial capital (the "Glass-Steagall" sections of the 1933 Act). Investment banks were barred from taking deposits or issuing credit, and could no longer access the Fed's liquidity provisions. They became a smaller sector acting mainly as intermediaries in the sale of corporate securities. JP Morgan hived off its investment business as Morgan Stanley and opted to become a commercial bank.

Commercial banks were barred from issuing, trading or holding securities - though a select few were allowed to sell Government bonds. They refocused on business and personal banking. Their interest rates were limited by "Regulation Q", supported by low rates on their capital reserves with the Fed (dictated by Treasury till 1951) and a Federal Deposit Insurance (FDIC) scheme. In the 1920s high interest rates as banks competed for deposits had contributed to risky investments. Now, cheap loans supported business and consumer spending as a key part of Roosevelt's economic recovery programme. New Deal reforms including increasing union rights, to defuse the class struggles of the 1930s, while redistributive programmes funded from taxation reduced inequality.

The Fed continued to be "lender of last resort" for commercial banking only. The Fed's centralised control over the supply of credit and short-term interest allowed it to implement a coherent national monetary policy, independent of the Executive or electoral democracy. When the US joined in WW2, the Fed carried 15% of US war debt and the commercial banks carried over a third, backed by the State FDIC scheme. This State-finance nexus became central to both capitalism and the institutional organisation of the New Deal State, say the authors.

In the earlier period, large corporations had required specialist managers, and their power now grew as share-holding increased and diversified away from banks. Industry-experienced managers were also important in the interventionist state. Roosevelt appointed a Business Advisory Council and much the same inner circle worked with Treasury and the State Department on WW2 planning, the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction and the Bretton Woods international trade and monetary regime. This continued in the US military industrial complex that emerged from the war. "The State-finance nexus served as a pivotal foundation for both industrial hegemony and the formation of a new American informal empire dominated by the marriage between multinational corporation and increasingly internationalised US banks".

"The distribution of surplus reflects relations of power between capitalist factions", say the authors. Their Graph 3.1 tracks dividends and retained earnings from 1935 to 1979, showing the accumulation and management of finance capital within corporations. This was reinvested in expansion and diversification, with any surplus loaned out on capital markets. Corporations' independence from banks meant the increasing "financialisation" of corporations themselves.

Most Important Lenders

They became the most important lenders for economic expansion and consumer credit. While middle managers were responsible for operations, "general" managers - Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Executive Officer (CEOs) - now managed "money-capital", allocating it between units or locations or other opportunities with high returns and withdrawing it from those with low returns.

"Larger-scale capital organisation reduces transaction costs, facilitates capital mobility across space as well as between sectors, and intensifies competitive disciplines on all investments to maximise returns". Top executives of globalising conglomerates were becoming money-capitalists, seeing their business divisions as a portfolio of financial assets - wherever they were in the world.

As the post-war boom slowed, European and Japanese firms with lower labour costs challenged US profitability, but raising prices to consumers produced a wage-price spiral of inflation and economic stagnation, despite tripartite wage and price control initiatives. The post-war compromise of labour and capital⁵ sharing productivity gains now broke down. Charts show compensation and profits falling from 1970, despite productivity rising again in the 1980s. In the late 1960s, the Government was funding welfare programmes and an expensive war in Vietnam, but its tax revenues were falling, pushing it to rely on debt; i.e. to borrow on financial markets. A major effect of the 1970s transition from "tax State" to "debt State" (with interest) was a massive increase in inequality.

Global inflation and an international dollar glut put pressure on the Fed and the Bretton Woods currency system. In August 1971, Nixon unilaterally suspended the US dollar's convertibility to gold, temporarily then permanently as other countries followed, ending the Bretton Woods controls on currency exchange rates and movement of capital. The book reviewed above reveals where that bright idea came from, together with independent powers of the Fed over monetary policy. Inflation worsened when the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil companies (including US ones) cut production in 1973 to raise prices.

Military-industrial profits slowed as the US pulled out of Vietnam. "Deregulation" to reduce inflation - the roll back of the New Deal State - began under Ford, then Carter, to be taken to new heights under Reagan. In 1979, Carter's Fed Chair Paul Volcker raised interest rates to "shock" levels. Maher and Aquanno date the neo-liberal era in the US from the following year.

Neoliberalism And Financial Hegemony, 1980-2008

The globalisation of US production from the 1970s was facilitated by the on-going financialisation of the non-financial firm, say the authors. But from 1979, their Graph 3.1 shows a marked change in the distribution of surplus capital. Earnings retained for reinvestment dropped abruptly, well below the dividends flowing out of corporations to shareholder owners, and then into market-based finance. Another graph shows an abrupt increase in the 1980s in the share of total US corporate profits going to financial firms. This share was 8% in the early post-war years but reached a high of over 40% by 2001.

The deep shift in power from managers to shareholders was first indicated by the "corporate raiders" of the 1980s: controlling shares were bought up with borrowed money, CEOs were fired and the firm's assets sold off to repay the borrowing. Regulatory changes by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) In the 1990s expanded shareholder rights and empowered boards of directors. Top managers should prioritise "shareholder value" - that is, the company's value on equity markets.

Financiers now "got their cut" of surplus value, not through bank loans as in 1880 to 1929, but through dividends and capital gains on equity. The fraction of financial capital that became hegemonic in the neo-liberal period was not only investment and commercial banks but big institutional investors in equity, such as mutual funds, pension funds and insurance companies, together with hedge funds and broker-dealers.

Fused into that financial fraction were industrial corporations themselves. CFOs now managed finance outside as well as inside industrial corporations, becoming primary lenders as well as borrowers on commercial paper⁶ markets. A graph shows a sharp rise in US non-financial corporate bonds from the mid-1980s. By the 1990s CFOs of US transnationals were investing and divesting capital across a "portfolio" of subsidiaries and commodity chain sub-contractors, to maximise returns.

Finance Was Critical For Mobility To Create Globally Integrated Accumulation

"Finance was critical for the mobility of investment that allowed industrial firms to create a new world of globally integrated accumulation", say Maher and Aquanno. This was not a "hollowing out" of industry, they say. Rather, financial investment and financial-style management intensified pressure on firms (and sub-contractors) to cut costs and wages, and maximise efficiency, competitiveness and profitability. Inside and outside industry, a system developed of asset-based capital accumulation and market-based finance - finance that was increasingly fragmented and could bypass bank regulations.

The ending of fixed exchange rates, capital controls and, more slowly, tariff protections⁷ increased the circulation of corporate capital across borders, at the risk of exchange or interest fluctuations that could wipe out profits. But this risk could be passed on to speculators through "derivative" contracts that locked in a certain price at a certain date, for a fee. As well as share, commodity and currency markets, markets developed for complex derivatives hedging short-term loans, long-term mortgages, commodity prices and any other financial risks dealers could think of. After the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, broker-dealer investment banks exploded.

"Shadow Banking System"

Maher and Aquanno provide excellent explanations of how new credit-money is created by this unregulated "shadow banking system"⁸ and how debt obligations - including mortgages, car finance, etc. - are pooled, sliced and repackaged as "securitised" assets, and traded on. These assets provided revenue streams (the interest) but could also be used as collateral for further credit creation. That is, you could have your asset and "liquid" cash too - to buy further assets. By 2007 the top 25 US banks were holding $US13 trillion in collateralised debt obligations. AIG, their main insurance company, was also a significant player. What could possibly go wrong?

The idea that the State retreated during this neoliberal period is wrong, say Maher and Aquanno. In the New Deal State, monetary policy was constrained by the Fed but remained subordinate to fiscal policy decided by Congress. More significant than the revolving door between finance, State agencies and the staff of Presidents was the reorganisation of the State economic apparatus around market-based finance - on which the State itself now depended. State power on monetary policy was now embedded in the Federal Reserve, together with Treasury's bank regulation office, the FDIC, the SEC and the Commodities Future Trading Commission.

Their "regulatory independence... effectively hollowed out democratic institutions", say the authors. The Fed's objective was to reduce inflation, including potential inflationary pressures, which might affect prices and international confidence in the dollar in a volatile, globally integrating floating-rate monetary system. The Fed had always provided liquidity and stability to financial markets (free cash currency and cheap secure Government bonds). The debt-financed State's large-scale borrowing became the secure collateral that underpinned all other multi-layered securities in finance markets. ⁹

The Fed conducted its monetary policy through the selling and buying Government bonds and also by temporarily selling and buying on the repo¹⁰ markets. From 1999 it accepted mortgage-backed securities as safe collateral, pushing other traders to do so too, say Meyer and Aquanno. But many "subprime" mortgages were based on shonky lending practices.

Global Financial Crisis

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was a liquidity crisis and a bank run in the shadow banking system as inter-bank lending collapsed. The $US700 billion voted by Congress to buy "troubled assets" was just part of the trillions the Fed and Treasury spent instead on recapitalising banks and AIG to restore confidence - without gaining public control over them. The banks were saved for free. The investment banks were merged or re-registered as regulated commercial banks, creating four "megabanks": Bank of America, JP Morgan, CityBank and Wells Fargo.

The Fed initially stabilised banking by requiring reserves that it paid interest on; then moved on to "quantitative easing" (QE) of the money supply and reducing interest rates by itself buying and selling assets in the financial markets.¹¹ That is, the "lender of last resort" had become the "dealer of last resort". The Fed also took control of the privatised former-State home-lenders Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac (that is, saved the mortgagee companies, not the homes).

Around three million homes a year were foreclosed on between 2008 and 2010. That's just in the US. As the crisis spread globally, the Fed opened dollar swap lines with other countries' central banks to maintain liquidity and confidence - and continues to do so.¹² Part of the GFC's cost to governments was then paid back by the victims of subsequent State austerity policies.

The GFC might look to you and me like a fuck-up. But Maher & Aquanno point out that neoliberal financialisation was not dysfunctional for the accumulation of capital. Fixed capital investment and corporate research and development (R&D) appeared to decline as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) or profit, but those profits were historically high throughout the financialisation period.

"All the 'speculative' markets at the centre of the neoliberal credit system…served to competitively circulate capital across the economy". And the world. To the most profitable opportunities. A larger share of value was captured by the disciplining of labour, tech developments, and globalisation of production to low wage zones. Not only did US capitalism survive the GFC, the crisis reinforced the global role of the American State, say the authors.

New Finance Capital

In the neoliberal period, the rise of finance within the industrial corporation was reinforced by the growing power of investors outside the firm. Large blocks of equity amassed by institutional investors (pension, insurance and sovereign funds) could be represented by "independent directors" on corporate boards. From 2013, the Dodds-Frank Act and its Volcker Rule once again prohibited speculative investment by deposit-holding banks, and limited their ability to expand their balance sheets.

This left equity and finance markets to less regulated players, at the same time pushing institutional cash pools into repo markets rather than bank deposits. This gave opportunities to a new group of companies - especially BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street - who from 2008 amassed an unprecedent concentration and diversity of assets under management.

This is a new capitalist class fraction, say Maher and Aquanno, that eliminates the New Deal distinction between "ownership" and "control" and concentrates the dispersed financial power of the neoliberal period. This fraction separates the monetary benefits of ownership, at a fee, from the powers of ownership. They cite Benjamin Braun's¹³ three characteristics of asset management firms: they have amassed unprecedented concentrations of equity; they are large owners in particular firms, and their holdings are "incredibly" diverse across the economy (including holdings of the large banks). They become "nodes in an extensive network of corporate control... a system of centralised economic power unseen since the days of JP Morgan".

The Big Three emerged as specialists in "passive management" of large-scale investment in S&P 500 or Nasdaq indexes and in indexed mutual funds, on a rising equity market. They also pool and re-issue securities as "exchange-traded funds". BlackRock owes its centrality to Aladdin, a software platform for assessing and managing risks in stocks, bonds, derivatives and currencies.

This is also used by its competitors, as well as by some of the largest investment banks and mutual funds.¹⁴ A diagram shows assets managers inserted in the flow of savings from workers to institutions to corporations, and the flow of returns back (circuit A). Assets managers who pool the capital formally own the assets they invest in (but not the dividends or gains from sale) and therefore control share voting rights.

Their low fees based on a percent of equity value mean they benefit from being passive investors, but are highly active owners. As directors on corporate boards, they direct management strategy to intensify competitiveness and “productivity” from labour and resources, and to maximise profitability - so raising the dividends and share price on which their percentage fees are based. Small fees, but the Big Three actively manage 2789 companies with a market capitalisation of nearly $US45 trillion - double the US GDP.

Asset manager firms - especially BlackRock, MP Morgan and Fidelity - also operate a second circuit of interest-bearing capital through cash management and through securities lending operations. Corporations, banks, foundations, insurance companies and pension funds often need quick access to their capital for cashflow or payouts. Repo markets are the primary way that non-deposit-taking financial institutions access cash. A diagram shows capital and cash-plus-interest flows as asset managers borrow "liquidity" on money markets, working through "custodian banks/clearing houses" that can hold collateral temporarily without actually transferring it (circuit B).

In securities lending, they lending assets to others (short-term or rolled-over) to use as collateral (to hedge risk or borrow liquidity, etc.). In this case, the asset is used in both circuits, enabling assets managers to further reduce fees and compete for investment savings to manage. The spread of the Big Three's operations across equity and money markets, with economies of scale in both, enables them to ride out or benefit from interest rate policy changes, i.e. quantitative easing or tightening.

Private Equity Funds & Hedge Funds

There has also been tremendous growth in two other distinct forms of finance firm: private equity funds and hedge funds. Since the 1990s but exploding since 2008 as the Fed eased interest rates, private equity firms set up investor funds to acquire private companies (or publicly listed companies that they "take private"¹⁵) by borrowing against company assets and future cashflow ("leveraged buyouts") which then becomes company debt. They use highly interventionist management practices to increase dividends and raise equity value before "exiting" or partially exiting with a capital gain after five to seven years.

About a third are sold on to other private equity firms. Hedge funds do highly activist, high-risk, high-fee investment in both public and private firms, but typically play no role in their management. Their aim is to profit from identifying over- or under-priced shares. They also engage in derivatives trading - purchasing or selling risk from other market traders - taking on enormous amounts of leverage (debt) to do so. Hedge funds oppose QE interventions, because they make money from market volatility.

The New Risk State

Critical to the rise of asset managers was a new "risk State" that mitigated and absorbed financial risk to keep interest rates low, in order to stimulate the post-crisis economy. By protecting "systemically important financial institutions", providing liquidity by buying Government bonds back from banks, and giving risk-free status to mortgage securities (the core of the repo market), the Fed paradoxically incentivised risk-taking in other financial markets at reduced cost. Low-cost finance and Fed support of (by trading in) the bond, equity and repo markets enabled a prolonged period of asset price inflation, helping grow the asset management firms. In 2013 the Fed developed an overnight repo facility that put a floor under interest rates, then in 2019 added a ceiling.

The Fed is ready to supply cash to repo markets at above-market rates, as it has long done to banks through short-term collateralised lending (its "discount window"). Institutional and pension funds do not meet the criteria, so continue to channel their capital-money through asset management firms. In 2008 BlackRock helped the Fed determine the value of toxic assets. Post-covid, the Fed got BlackRock to coordinate its purchase of mortgage-based securities and corporate bonds, including junk ones, without Congressional authorisation. "The Fed now claimed the power to lend unlimited funds to industrial corporations... all but eliminating the distinction between public and private debt".

The Fed Unleashed All Its Power, Without A Fig Leaf Of Democratic Legitimacy

Through successive QE measures, State power initially deployed to manage the Global Financial Crash has become integral to the "normal" function of the financial system, and accelerated during the covid crisis. The Fed expanded its balance sheet from $US900 billion before 2008 to $US9.1 trillion in March 2022. "To hold together the financial system and support non-financial corporations, the Fed unleashed all the power it had accumulated since 2008 ...without so much as a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy". From "lender of last resort" to banks, it moved to "dealer of last resort" in repo markets, and now "proactively structures markets in the first instance", say the authors, setting rates and preventing market prices from taking hold.

The deepening connection between the State apparatus and the shadow banking system demonstrates the prominence and influence of the asset managers, BlackRock in particular. This includes a "revolving door" into politics. Top BlackRock executives worked in various capacities for Obama, Biden and Kamala Harris. CEO Larry Fink has a 40-year relationship with Trump.¹⁶ Current policies to support more robust US industries focus on increasing competitiveness and capital mobility, not on reversing four decades of neoliberal devastation of working-class communities, say the authors.

Concentrating Capital, Intensifying Exploitation, Increasing Risk

BlackRock and other asset managers now have "a deep role in the plumbing of the financial system", say Maher and Aquanno. They see their pooling of funds as a means of "socialising" fragmented savings and surplus cash, and reallocating it from relatively "unproductive" outlets to those offering the highest returns. They see the highly autonomous Fed as acting, not in the interest of individual firms or capitalists but "to serve the systemic imperatives of capitalist accumulation".

Not that they think all this is a good thing. They dismiss suggestions that corporate Environmental, Social and Governance policies or "green" indexes mean anything more than better accounting on future risks for investors, or that "universal ownership" gives the Big Three an interest in general economic health. There are repeated small reminders that the growth of finance capital rests on - intensifies - the exploitation of workers and impacts on environment and climate, both in the US and across its global systems of extraction.

The fundamental contradiction of finance capital is that it is not possible to de-risk capitalism. In fact, the State's deeper interventions into interconnected financial markets (and therefore corporations) may be setting the stage for dramatic "market corrections", say the authors. Moreover, Dodds-Frank's Volcker Rule separating commercial banking and investment was subsequently loosened for smaller banks, then partially repealed in 2018 under Trump. Lower capital requirements under international "Basel III Endgame" rules will benefit large-capitalisation banks.

Trump's 2025 deregulations included loosened oversight and lower capital requirements for community banks, reduced Fed scrutiny of crypto currencies, and a "develop first, regulate later" approach to artificial intelligence (AI). Sovereign fund investment by Governments in AI are increasing. My favourite UK economist Richard Murphy warns of an imminent global financial crisis triggered by crypto and/or AI.¹⁷

We are already in a multidimensional ecological crisis and, after decades of neoliberalism, a significant social crisis, which in the US is delegitimising both politics and capitalism as an economic system. Expecting "big finance" or corporations to decarbonise the economy is bound to fail, say Maher and Aquanno. The green transition requires a democratically transformed State to mobilise - nationalise - the productive capacities and energy infrastructure currently owned by private corporations. A democratically managed economy is "an urgent and pragmatic necessity to ensure human survival".

Finance Needs To Be Run As A Public Utility By The State

Just nationalising the Big Three would achieve little, as they allocate investment based on price signals and profits. In order to allocate investment to social and ecological needs, finance needs to be run as a public utility by the state, connecting and drawing on democratic workplaces, employee pension funds, other institutional funds and the banking system.

The Fed would be pivotal in any strategy to democratise finance, because of its fundamental role in money creation, its role in both domestic and international monetary systems and as the nexus of the banking and shadow banking systems. A highly recommended read. The socialist transformation points are made briefly in the last few pages of the book - I'll be looking for more writing by Maher and Aquanno that fleshes out these ideas. There's a YouTube interview on this book. Endnotes:

1. Moomoo media release, Scoop, 6/6/25. Not to mention our KiwiSaver funds investing in the US.
2. Aquanno is a political scientist at Ontario Tech University, and the Global Labour Research Centre at York University. In 2021 he published "Crisis Of Risk: Subprime Debt And US Financial Power From 1944 To Present". Maher is an economist at State University of New York, Cortland. In 2022 he published "Corporate Capitalism And The Integral State: General Electric And A Century Of American Power". Both were doctoral students of late Canadian political economist Leo Panitch, editor of Socialist Register and prolific writer on capitalist globalisation.
3. See my review in Watchdog 164, December 2023.
4. "The circuit whereby money is advanced and then returned with interest".
5. The US restricted unions to enterprise-only bargaining in 1940 - 50 years before NZ. As well as fragmenting local wage negotiations, this ended a traditional practice of supplying "union hall" labour to employers (with great effect on employer behaviour).
6. Unsecured short-term loans, to cover payroll, an inventory delivery or tax payments rather than cashing in assets. Or what in NZ may be called "the overnight money market". Longer ones may be sold on at a discount on face value.
7. Required under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) from 1948, and World Trade Organisation (WTO) from 1996.
8. Defined as "money market funding of capital market lending".
9. There's a whole 1973 theory of investment behind this, called Black and Scholes.
10. Repo = the sale and repurchase of securities, including Government bonds, as a means of borrowing short-term cash; the difference between sale and repurchase prices acts as interest.
11. I.e. the Fed spends into the US economy "by purchasing securities in the open market; QE aims to lower interest rates and boost the money supply, providing the finance markets with additional liquidity" (Investopedia.com, 1/8/25). The Fed currently sets bank reserve requirements at zero and zero interest, says Investopedia, relying on international rules for banks under Basel Accords I to III. NZ does require banks to deposit reserves with the Reserve Bank, based on an assessed risk level of their investments, sets an Official Base Rate of interest on reserves and loans in the hope of stimulating or cooling the economy, and currently has a deposit guarantee scheme of $100,000 per customer per bank.
12. J. McGeever, "Fed Independence Spotlight Shines On Dollar Swap Lines", Reuters, 25/9/25.
13. Political economist, London School of Economics. The political economy of asset manager capitalism. YouTube interview
14. Let's not forget asset managers "riding the wave" of the estimated $140 trillion in global private assets of high-net-worth investors. PitchBook News, 10/10/25.
15. I.e. less regulated, no longer any public reporting requirements.
16. "P McKillop, Larry Fink And Donald Trump: An Unexpected Partnership", Climate & Capital Media, 10/3/25;
    C Gasparino, "How BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Has Turned Into The Darling Of The MAGA Movement", New York Post, 8/3/25.
17. M Guerra, D Kohen, "Regulatory Rollback", 20/5/25, Morgan Stanley, PitchBook, "How Sovereign AI Is Transforming Private Markets", The Research Pitch newsletter, 1/11/25; R Murphy, "Crypto Vs AI: Which Bubble Bursts First?", October 2025.

REVIEW

- Richard Keller

PAKUKORE
Poverty By Design
Edited by: Rebecca Macfie, Graeme Whimp, and Brigitte Bonisch-Brednich
BWB Texts, 172 pp.

"If Inequity Was Designed, Then It Can Be Redefined"

Global societies have long been organised to take advantage of human ingenuity and its ability to redesign and recreate ecospheres. In our time this can be framed as "exploitation", because the planet is suffering from challenges of dealing with human influences. We have increasingly become conscious of this in recent decades (century?) including the scientific recognition of the phenomenon of "climate change".

This short BBW tract dealing with "poverty" is examining and challenging this impact of our exploiter self. However, it unfortunately does not actually discuss poverty within the larger context of our exploitative relationship to the planet. Poverty cannot be fully understood without this general exploitative context, so the "what to do" section is probably too unfocused. I only use the term "unfocused" as a suggestion and will not go into it any further in this review, instead looking briefly at the organisation and individual contributions in the book. All of these contributors have some in-depth knowledge and insight which is worthwhile to consider; I will only outline the discussions.

The book begins with an introduction by the editors discussing how their hui came up with the brilliant subtitle, "Poverty By Design". Callum Katene (Ngati Toa) in the chapter "Framing Poverty" says: "All throughout history, the accumulation of wealth by the few has resulted in the poverty of the many". A perfect summary of the focus of the book. A look at the Treaty and early settlers begins the discussion.

Under section heading "How it Happens", Hana O'Regan (Kai Tahu) begins with how education is organised around cultural principles of Pakeha only, but justified by a claim of "egalitarianism" which covers up the disadvantage to those of another culture, and other myths like "clean and green". An interesting claim is that before colonialism took hold Māori literacy rates were higher than pakeha. Huana Hickey reminds that poverty is not "policy failure", it is by design.

Bill Rosenberg writes on Work and Wages: Many of those who have both "benefits" and wages are still low income and in poverty by any reasonable definition. There is an unequal power relationship between employer and employee, celebrated by the Employment Contracts Act of 1991, resulting in lower levels of union membership. He doesn't have the space to redesign industrial relations but offers several suggestions for changes.

Tracey McIntosh (Ngai Tuhoe) writes thoroughly on "dispossession". The "slow violence" of dispossession (including prisons). Often denying indigenous ways of life. Putting tamariki into State care. Both economic and cultural impoverishment; the "normal" functioning of society can be "disastrous". There must be "radical honesty" of this for change to occur.

Max Rashbrooke says we can afford to tackle poverty. (But I ask, do those who say it can't be afforded really want to tackle poverty? And does New Zealand really want to admit to its poverty?). The common (at the heart of the current Government) cliché is that there is no money. However, borrowing for future infrastructure needs is rational. (Building highways is intentional destruction, also making it a lie that there is no money). Proper levels of tax revenues will provide money for real needs.

Section: What It's Like

Jin Russell and Nikki Turner. The human brain is marvellously complex, and poverty unnaturally prevents its normal development. Early health is critical. Craig Rennie forms the discussion of poverty specifically around "child poverty", and the problems it makes for society; not only for an individual in poverty. Housing is a chief indicator.

Section: "What To Do"

Miriana Stephens (Ngati Rarua) writes about her experience with Te Awhina Marae Papakainga. Her grandparents cultivated a commitment to service; leadership is built on service, and papakainga is providing an opportunity to return to living together. Lisa Marriott writes that tax matters. Tax income, consumption, or wealth. Most countries tax wealth unless specifically excluded by law.

In Aotearoa, wealth is only taxed if specifically included by legislation. (To me this is a very significant item in describing who we are in this country, my term is "property extremists".) Marriott lists four types of wealth tax: Capital gains (sale$ less purchase$); Wealth (annual, low rate, perhaps with a threshold); Land ("wealth", yes, but restricted to land); Estate (perhaps excluding that passed on to spouse or charities)

Sue Bradford passes on her long story of organising for welfare justice, describing the "punitive" nature of welfare in Aotearoa, and noting that recent Labour-led governments have never implemented transformational change. Importantly, she recognises that while there has been an upsurge among community activists of the intersectional links between colonisation, capitalism and the climate crisis, for example, she asks where is the organisation and mobilisation needed around that. (Along with this broad discussion, I feel the need to add that it is necessary to consciously discuss the post-truth reality of this era we live in). Finally, Sarah-Jane Paine discusses The Place of Love, Rage, and Indigenous Resistance.

Watchdog - 170 December 2025

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