Damien Grant bullshit artist | The Jackal

11 Feb 2013

Damien Grant bullshit artist

Today, the NZ Herald reported:

David Shearer and his cohort of prospective coalition partners, the Greens, Mana and NZ First, are holding a show-trial into who killed the manufacturing industry.

Forty thousand manufacturing jobs have disappeared, Shearer declares.

Actually, it's now likely to be a lot more than that with the latest Labour House Survey (PDF) that was released a few days ago showing another 17,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost during 2012.

What he does not say is those 40,000 jobs have gone since a peak right before the 2008 recession and almost half of that loss occurred in the final year of the last Labour government.

The global recession began in December 2007 and the peak in manufacturing the idiot is talking about occurred in September 2008 at exactly the same time the global economy took a particularly sharp downturn.

That means the right wing cannot blame the recession for the continued shedding of manufacturing jobs, because there was growth in the manufacturing sector under Labour for the first half of the recession.

What's obviously to blame for all but the most brainwashed neoliberal ideolog is Nationals woeful economic mismanagement.

The losses in manufacturing since 2008 have been more than made up for by new jobs in education and training, health and professional services.

Is that why unemployment has more than doubled under the current National administration? Talk about cherry picking statistics to fit his defunct and baseless argument.

Damien Grant is obviously a complete conman, and probably wouldn't know the truth is it came up and bit him on the arse! Why the Herald allows his drivel to be published is anyones guess.

In the meantime, those of us not engaged in the sector would be paying more for imported products such as petrol. Particularly distressing, the cost of upgrading my smartphone would rise.

However things aren't cheaper because importers and distributors are soaking up much of the savings by increasing their profit margins... So while we're losing lots of manufacturing jobs as more companies go out of business because of the high dollar, we're still paying overinflated prices.

It's not really about consumerism either... The reason behind National keeping the dollar high is probably a bit more complex than that... John Key is first and foremost a money trader after all.

Key obviously has little thought for how well Kiwi families are doing, as exhibited by the growing inequality and poverty throughout the country.

Manufacturing jobs have been killed because the economic tide has moved.

The reality of the situation is that more people have less money to buy imported items that are still too expansive. The only people who really benefit from such a scam is the middle men who are making a killing off using slave or extremely low waged labour in places like China and India.

The facts of the matter remain... Most other developed countries around the world have recovered a lot faster than New Zealand has from the recession even though we were in a better position to begin with, so simply blaming it all on the recession is clearly unfounded.

The main culprit is Nationals woeful performance... Their complete lack of any proper economic planning or initiative is clearly the reason for New Zealands declining economic position.

I wonder if people like Damien Grant will ever wake up and smell their own bullshit?