Kia ora e te whānau. Ko Ivor Jones tēnei, ko Te Māori Green Lantern. No Te Arawa ahau, no Ngāti Pikiao. Ka mihi ki a koutou katoa.

Our rangatira John Merito sent me an article about MAGA supporters complaining that their grocery bills keep climbing despite Trump’s promises (Raw Story, 2025). The piece exposes how “the deliberate deconstruction of the middle class and perceived rise of socialism are used ad nauseum as reasoning/arguments.” John’s whakaaro was sharp - he spotted the same tired playbook we’ve seen destroy communities from Te Tai Tokerau to South Auckland for forty bloody years.

Let me be crystal clear about what we’re witnessing: the exact same forces that decimated Māori communities through Rogernomics in the 1980s are now eating their own in America. The smoking gun? These aren’t economic “reforms” - they’re calculated wealth transfers from workers to billionaires, wrapped in the rhetoric of “freedom” and “choice” while punishing people for the crime of being poor.

Here’s what they don’t want you to know: New Zealand’s wealthiest 119 individuals now control $102.1 billion - that’s over 40% of our entire GDP (RNZ, 2025). The Mowbray brothers alone sit on $20 billion. Graeme Hart, who bought the Government Printing Office for a criminally undervalued $23 million during Labour’s 1980s fire sale, now controls $12.1 billion (WSWS, 2025).

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of New Zealanders - millions of people - hold just 7% of the nation’s wealth (Stats NZ, 2024). In 2024, while rich-listers added $6.5 billion to their fortunes, average household wealth fell by $4.185 billion (RNZ, 2025).

Māori unemployment rocketed to 25% in 1992 following Rogernomics restructuring, while the general unemployment rate was 10% - demonstrating how neoliberal policies devastated Māori communities disproportionately.

For Māori, the devastation is genocidal in its precision. Māori median wealth sits at $23,000 - one-fifth of the European median of $114,000. Pacific peoples have $12,000 (RNZ, 2017). These aren’t accidents. These are the intended outcomes of a system designed to concentrate wealth upward while keeping tangata whenua locked in poverty.

European New Zealanders have a median net worth of $114,000 - five times that of Māori ($23,000) and nearly ten times that of Pacific peoples ($12,000), reflecting the intersection of colonial dispossession and neoliberal economic policies.

The Whakapapa of Plunder: Rogernomics as Blueprint

Between 1984 and 1993, Roger Douglas and his Treasury acolytes - flooded with Chicago School economists and backed by the Business Roundtable - unleashed an economic blitzkrieg on working New Zealanders (Centrist, 2024). The results were catastrophic and calculatedly racist:

Māori Unemployment rocketed from 8% in 1986 to 25% in 1992, while general unemployment hit 10% (Te Ara, 2012). By the end of 1992, while Māori made up just 8% of the workforce in 1986, they accounted for 26% of all job losses (Te Ara, 2012).

The state corporations where Māori workers were concentrated - Electricity Corporation (3,000 jobs), Coal Corporation (4,000), Forestry Corporation (5,000), NZ Post (8,000) - were gutted (Wikipedia, 2025). Total state sector job losses exceeded 111,000. Māori job loss rates between 1988-1991 were

15.1% compared to 3.1% for Pākehā (Te Ara, 2012).

The economic carnage was matched by social devastation:

child poverty doubled from 14% in 1982 to 29% in 1994.

Food banks proliferated from virtually none to 365 by 1994. Māori home ownership, which had reached over 50% in 1991, collapsed to 37% by 2013 - a decline of nearly one-third (RNZ, 2007).

While workers bled, Roger Kerr’s Business Roundtable coordinated the plunder. As documented by historian Danyl McLauchlan,

“The entire process was coordinated by Treasury. From July 1984, it became the conduit between corporate interests such as the Business Round Table and the most influential cabinet ministers” (Integrity Institute, 2024).

The wealthiest 1% of New Zealanders control 17.5% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% - millions of people - hold just 7%. The top 10% control over half of all wealth.

The Atlas Conspiracy: Global Networks of Wealth Extraction

This wasn’t some organic

“reform”

- it was a coordinated international assault. Enter the Atlas Network, founded in 1981 by Anthony Fisher as the global coordinator for neoliberal think tanks (Atlas Network, 2025). With revenues of US$20.2 million (NZ$32.8m) in 2022, Atlas distributed grants totaling US$8.8 million globally, with US$75,800 (NZ$123,000) coming to Aotearoa and Australia (PSA, 2024).

Their New Zealand partners? The New Zealand Initiative (formerly the Business Roundtable merged with the NZ Institute in 2012) and the Taxpayers’ Union. David Seymour, our current coalition partner wielding power far beyond his electoral mandate, previously worked for the Atlas-affiliated Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Canada. Atlas Network chair Debbi Gibbs’ father helped found the ACT party (Wikipedia, 2025).

These aren’t think tanks - they’re money-laundering operations for billionaire ideology. Their modus operandi, as researcher Josh Drummond documented, is “to write stultifyingly dull papers, create model legislation, get pet MPs and parties elected, and incessantly insert their messaging into the public consciousness via the media” (NZ Herald, 2023).

The Money Pipeline: Who Profits from Our Misery

Let’s name names and trace the cash. Graeme Hart, our wealthiest resident, donated $804,000 to right-wing parties: $400,000 to National, $304,000 to ACT, $150,000 to NZ First (Integrity Institute, 2025). Property developer Trevor Farmer gave $480,000 split between National, ACT and NZ First. Mark Wyborn donated $300,000. Manufacturing’s Warren Lewis gave National $500,000 in one hit - possibly the largest single donation ever (RNZ, 2023).

Since 2021, National received over $1.3 million from the property industry alone. These aren’t philanthropists - they’re investors buying policy. And what did they buy? The restoration of interest deductibility for landlords. The bright-line test slashed from 10 years to 2. Foreign buyers allowed back in for properties over $2 million.

Our Prime Minister Christopher Luxon owns a property portfolio that earned him $4.34 million in paper gains in one year - 15 times his PM salary (NZ Herald, 2024). He’s since sold some properties, likely pocketing hundreds of thousands tax-free under the rules his government protects. This is the man lecturing struggling families about “choices.”

The MAGA Mirror: Same Playbook, Different Accent

Now watch how this exact playbook destroys Trump’s own supporters. MAGA voters are posting in desperation: “I support everything Trump is doing internationally, but grocery prices are not coming down. They are going up. My grocery bills are eating my budget” (BuzzFeed, 2025). Another pleaded: “We voted for Trump to fix this!! HELP YOUR PEOPLE FIRST” (Yahoo, 2025).

The cruel irony? A MAGA mother on SNAP benefits asked her mother-in-law for help buying baby formula after Trump’s government shutdown halted her benefits. The response? “We voted for this” (Yahoo, 2025).

In the US, the middle class has collapsed from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021 (Pew Research, 2022). Their share of national income plummeted from 60% in 1970 to 43% by 2022 (LinkedIn, 2025). Deaths of despair - from drugs, alcohol, and suicide - doubled from 40 per 100,000 in 2000 to 80 in 2015, concentrated among the middle-aged working class (Case and Deaton research cited in Financial Times analysis).

Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that fewer than half of those born in the 1980s earned more than their parents, compared to 90% of those born in 1940 (Fortune, 2017). The American Dream is dead, killed by the same forces that murdered the Kiwi Dream.

The Rhetoric of Reversal: Scapegoating Socialism While Practicing Socialism for the Rich

Here’s the fascist playbook both Trumpism and our coalition government employ: blame “socialism” for problems caused by capitalism, then practice socialism exclusively for the wealthy.

Marxist analysis explains this clearly. As John Bellamy Foster documents, MAGA ideology mobilizes the lower middle class - small business owners, contractors, the self-employed - against the professional-managerial class and working class, while protecting monopoly capital (MROnline, 2025).

“The MAGA ideology is particularly geared to promoting lower middle-class rage against the upper middle class and working-class elements of society (not the capitalist class),”

Foster writes.

This is textbook fascism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels warned of

“middle-class socialism” - the bourgeoisie wanting “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them. They want a middle class without a working class” (Architects for Social Housing, 2019).

The hypocrisy is staggering. Trump gave billionaires trillions in tax cuts while his supporters queue at food banks. In New Zealand, we bailed out South Canterbury Finance investors for $1.7 billion

- “financially literate people who lost their savings,”

as Ngāti Porou leader Wharehinga Ngarimu noted bitterly - while Treaty settlements only ticked over $1 billion in total after decades (RNZ, 2007).

National slashed disability support, cut school lunches from $8.68 to $3, and gutted public services - while Luxon’s properties appreciated millions and the rich-listers added billions. That’s socialism for the rich, savage capitalism for everyone else.

Tikanga Violations: The Spiritual Dimension of Economic Violence

Every principle of tikanga Māori stands violated by this system:

• Whanaungatanga (relationships and reciprocity) is destroyed when 109,000 households have negative net worth while 18 billionaires hoard $50+ billion.
• Manaakitanga (care and generosity) is mocked when one in five Māori children live in material hardship while the PM protects his tax-free property gains.
• Kaitiakitanga (guardianship for future generations) is betrayed when child poverty doubles and our tamariki are lifted from their whānau at birth.
• Rangatiratanga (self-determination) is denied when neoliberal policies force Māori unemployment to 25% then blame us for the resulting poverty.
• Aroha (compassion) is absent when disabled people lose support, pensioners can’t afford kai, and families choose between rent and food.

This isn’t just economic policy - it’s spiritual warfare. The deliberate impoverishment of our people violates the fundamental covenant of te Tiriti o Waitangi and attacks the wairua of our communities.

The Pattern Recognition: It’s Always Been the Same Fight

Whether it’s MAGA supporters in Missouri or Māori whānau in Gisborne, the pattern is identical:

1. Destroy local economies through privatization and deregulation

2. Gut public services and welfare support

3. Blame victims for their poverty using racist and classist rhetoric

4. Scapegoat “socialism” while practicing socialism for the wealthy

5. Prevent organizing by dividing workers along racial/cultural lines

6. Capture democracy through massive political donations

7. Profit enormously while communities collapse

The freezing works that employed Māori whānau in Gisborne? Closed. The Wattie’s factory? Gone. The Post Office, the railways, the forestry jobs? All gutted (RNZ, 2007). Just as Trump’s tariffs and deportations destroy his own supporters’ livelihoods while he golfs at Mar-a-Lago.

The Quantified Harm: Real People, Real Suffering

Let’s be absolutely clear about the body count of neoliberalism on Māori:

• Māori continue to experience

This isn’t “tough times” or “economic cycles” - this is systematic, intentional harm. When Gisborne lost its freezing works and Wattie’s factory, $12 million a year went into pokie machines - money that “would clothe and feed the whole of Tairawhiti,” as community leader Ngarimu testified (RNZ, 2007).

The International Network: Atlas, Trump, and Aotearoa

The connections are direct and documented. In 2006, Atlas Network hosted Charles Murray - author of The Bell Curve with its racist pseudoscience about intelligence - as keynote speaker. Murray predicted that

“If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon?” (NZ Herald, 2025).

This is the ideological through-line from the Mont Pelerin Society to Rogernomics to MAGA: using

“science” and “economics”

to justify racial and class hierarchies. Historian Quinn Slobodian calls them

“Hayek’s Bastards”

- the mutant strains of neoliberalism that

“biologicise questions of human ethics”

to argue some people simply deserve poverty (NZ Herald, 2025).

Peter Thiel, now the richest New Zealander at NZ$28.4 billion after his fortune doubled under Trump, epitomizes these connections (NZ Herald, 2025). A citizenship-of-convenience holder who spent 12 days here, Thiel embodies rootless capital extracting wealth globally while owing loyalty to none.

The Cui Bono Analysis: Who Benefits?

Follow the money to its conclusion:

• The Rich Get Richer: While household wealth fell $4.185 billion in 2024, rich-listers added $6.5 billion. Billionaire wealth in Aotearoa increased by $5 billion NZD in 2024 alone - $12 million per day (Oxfam, 2025).
• Politicians Profit: Luxon’s properties earn him 15 times his salary. Cabinet ministers own multiple investment properties, directly benefiting from policies they vote for.
• Donors Win Policy: Property investors get tax breaks worth hundreds of millions. Landlords get interest deductibility restored. Foreign buyers get access. Every dollar donated returns hundredfold in policy benefits.
• Workers Lose Everything: Real wages stagnate. Housing becomes unaffordable. Public services deteriorate. The social contract is shredded.
• Māori Suffer Most: Every indicator - poverty, health, education, incarceration, unemployment, wealth - shows Māori bearing the heaviest burden of neoliberal “reforms.”

This isn’t capitalism failing - it’s capitalism succeeding exactly as designed.

Logical Fallacies Deployed: The Rhetoric of Oppression

Every argument defending this system employs classic fallacies:

• False Dichotomy: “It’s either free markets or socialism” - ignoring the reality that we have socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor.
• Just World Fallacy: “People are poor because of their choices” - ignoring structural barriers, historical dispossession, and systemic racism.
• Naturalistic Fallacy: “Inequality is natural/inevitable” - ignoring that the current level of inequality is historically unprecedented and policy-driven.
• Appeal to Authority: “Treasury/economists say...” - ignoring that Treasury was captured by Chicago School ideologues with a specific political agenda.
• Victim Blaming: “Māori unemployment is cultural” - ignoring that it was 8% before Rogernomics, jumped to 25% after state sector restructuring, and is clearly caused by policy not culture.
• Scapegoating: “Socialism is destroying the middle class” - while actually billionaire capitalism is destroying the middle class and calling opposition “socialist.”
• Dog Whistles: “Welfare dependency,” “personal responsibility,” “colorblind policy,” “reverse racism” - all coded language to justify racial and class oppression.

The Path Forward: Resistance and Restoration

So what do we do? First, we name the pattern. When MAGA supporters complain about grocery prices, we say:

“You’re experiencing what Māori experienced 40 years ago when the same ideology destroyed our communities.”

We build solidarity across borders and ethnicities around shared class interests.

Second, we demand accountability. Every politician, every party taking money from billionaires and property developers while gutting services for the poor must be exposed and opposed. Luxon, Seymour, Peters - name them. Hart, Farmer, Wyborn - name them. The New Zealand Initiative, Atlas Network - name them.

Third, we organize. The Council of Trade Unions, community organizations, iwi, churches, unions - every group suffering under this system must coordinate resistance. The strikes happening now are just the beginning.

Fourth, we reclaim the narrative. When they say

“socialism,”

we say

“you mean socialism for the rich?”

When they say

“personal responsibility,”

we say

“you mean holding billionaires responsible for hoarding wealth?”

When they blame poverty on culture, we show them the unemployment charts that prove it’s policy.

Fifth, we rebuild tikanga-based economics. Cooperatives. Collective ownership. Redistributive taxation. A guaranteed minimum income. Free education and healthcare. Houses as homes not investments. An economy that serves whānau, not shareholders.

Choose Your Side

John Merito’s question exposes the rot at the heart of both MAGA and our coalition government. The

“deliberate deconstruction of the middle class”

isn’t a conspiracy theory - it’s documented policy traced through decades of Atlas Network activity, Treasury papers, political donations, and economic outcomes.

The same forces that tell Trump supporters their problems are caused by

“socialism”

while billionaires add trillions told Māori that

“the market”

required shutting the freezing works and railways. It’s always been a lie. There is no

“free market”

- only the question of which class the state serves.

The rich-listers are worth $102.1 billion while 109,000 households have negative wealth. Luxon earns millions from houses while cutting services for disabled people. Hart donates nearly a million to right-wing parties while his superyacht costs hundreds of millions. MAGA supporters beg Trump for help while he golfs and billionaires add billions.

E hoa mā, the choice is clear:

Stand with the billionaires or stand with the people. There is no middle ground. The system is working exactly as designed - the question is whether we’re going to accept it or dismantle it.

Kia kaha. Kia māia. Kia manawanui.

This analysis is dedicated to all those who lost their jobs, their homes, their health, and their hope to the neoliberal experiment - and especially to Māori whānau who continue to resist despite forty years of intentional impoverishment.

If this mahi has value for you and your whānau, and you have capacity, a koha would be deeply appreciated to support ongoing investigative work: HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. No pressure - take care of your own whānau first.

Me kore ake he tangata, kei hea te tangata? Without people, where would we be?

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern

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Pew Research Center. (2022). How the American Middle Class Has Changed in the Past Five Decades. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/

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Slobodian, Q. (2025). Hayek’s Bastards: Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Far Right. Princeton University Press. Reviewed in NZ Herald.

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Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand. (2012). Government Reforms, 1980s. https://teara.govt.nz/en/government-reforms-1980s/page-2