Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Follow the Money Zwei

In the course of today I have come across this opinion piece on stuff.co.nz by Patrick Smellie.

It looks at the rationalisation of Finance Industry Lobby Groups and includes some interesting points, including:
The Roundtable struggles not to get noticed, and suffers from its every utterance being automatically pigeon-holed as a daft fancy of the extreme right. Shaking off that image would make the Roundtable a more powerfully influential body, but reputations die hard.
Which suggests that the New Zealand Initiative may be as I feared a lobby group to advocate for the needs of corporations over people.

1 comment:

  1. As ever an astute commentary.

    I've also been interested in how the finance companies that managed to lose millions of dollars of other people's money have been found criminally liable. This means that these people have committed crimes, much like stealing from a shop or taking someone's car. In fact it's the same, actually if you want to draw a real parallel it is far more like breaking into your home and taking you TV or your record collection. If you broke into hundreds of people's homes and stole millions of dollars what kind of punishment would you get? If you did the same thing, but wear a white collar and have a highly paid legal team what kind of punishment should you get? hmmmm money eh! Perhaps they should think tank that...

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