In part 1, “Operation Overwealth”, the career trajectory of former Air New Zealand CEO Chris Luxon was examined in parallel with tectonic geo-political shifts over the course of the last half century, corresponding with Luxon’s life-span. Scholarly sources were presented to show that oligarchs can only exist in societies with great economic inequality. But also, that the super-rich use their immense wealth to steer the political trajectories of whole societies, while thriving in crises.
In this part, former Māori Television editor, Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards, demonstrates how New Zealand was reset in the mid-1980s to reforge the nation as a crisis-ridden society for benefit of a civil oligarchy. The archipelago was re-engineered from a centrally-planned inefficient economy controlled by Wellington bureaucrats, into a tollbooth economy centrally-planned by Big Finance, Big Agencies, and Big Think-Tanks — delivering financial impoverishment for most.
As he noted in part 1, Luxon’s participation in a business delegation to Switzerland in 2017, was sponsored by the New Zealand Initiative. In 2012, this think tank was incorporated as the result of a merger between the New Zealand Institute and the New Zealand Business Roundtable. The Business Roundtable was the most notorious of the domestic think-tanks that colluded to privatize state assets, while its members inflicted economic warfare to impoverish the population in cahoots with state managers at the Reserve Bank, which was established by statute in 1933.
This High Flyers Club exposé also proves how the Reserve Bank, in collusion with Treasury and with the domestic and international banking cartel — only let interest rates fall through thresholds once state managers had inflicted desired policies, or once such measures had the intended results and would (or had) cause(d) the inflation rate to drop toward a desired margin. On Don Brash’s watch as the Reserve Bank Governor for 13 years and 33 weeks, he oversaw this inflation targetting regime; a scheme to suppress wages and salaries to deliver big businesses big profits.
This deep dive shows why the nation is an expensive place to live. Snoopman traces the sell-off of state commercial trading entities, infrastructure and services to local and foreign corporations, to demonstrate these wealth transfers transformed Kiwis into neo-feudal peasants — eternally paying taxes, tolls, and tickets to oligarchs.
Kiwis are shown to be cast like hapless players in a New Zealand Edition of Monopoly, where the game is periodically updated by the game’s ‘owners’, to suit the wealthy players, particularly ‘the banker’. Ergo, economic impoverishment is key to undermining all rights, including freedom of speech, association and movement.
Therefore, part 2 “High Flyers Club” of this six-part series, Lux Luthor Redux, climbs far above the clouds to metaphorically cruise at 33,000 feet over the South Pacific archipelago to show Luxon has benefited from the Halcyon Days of the Heist of New Zealand Monopoly Board, when the oligarchy reforged itself and grew richer.
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