Wednesday, August 10, 2011

A worthless, pea-brained randroid, who's no longer permitted to soil these pages with his white supremacist idiocy and his misanthropic longings for Armageddon, wants to know why I haven't commented on the rioting in England (but not elsewhere in the United Kingdom).
He's enjoying the madness because he believes that this country is under the control of an alliance of Communists and Islamists, so far is he removed from the real world. He thinks I must be enjoying it too, because, as a dirty red (i.e., not a fascist or worshipper of Mammon) I am part of the conspiracy to destroy civilisation.

So it is necessary once more to waste time arguing with the brainwashed.

The trouble began after an unarmed man was shot dead by police in Tottenham, North London. A peaceful protest march by family, friends and neighbours of the victim, lobbied the local police station. The cops, true to form, changed the mood by beating a sixteen-year old girl on the march with batons. The crowd turned angry and fighting broke out. So far, so predictable.
The violence spread and soon Tottenham was a battle-zone. People with a grudge against the heavy-handed police saw their chance for payback. As always happens in these situations low-life types took the opportunity to indulge in a bout of shopbreaking and theft. Gradually, the whole scene turned into an orgy of vandalism and larceny. While the cops are busy assaulting people with a real grievance the people they should be controlling, but somehow never manage to, are having a field day.
This is our Big Society. The government is in the process of shedding all state responsibility for its citizens. You're on your own now, says Cameron, if you want anything doing do it for yourself. The looters soon got the hang of the new zeitgeist, they helped themselves to what they wanted.
This is the house that Thatcher built, and her successors and admirers built onto or shored up. It's a ramshackle affair and it will collapse eventually, but meanwhile the landlord is squeezing the tenants dry and ignoring complaints about vermin infestation, neglect of maintenance, and overcrowding. But we'd better not take our complaints round to the landlord's office or he'll set the dogs on us.
Deregulation, privatisation, selling off the family silver; the British people see everything earlier generations struggled to achieve being destroyed, dismantled or stolen. What was once in public ownership is sold off to thimble riggers and find-the-lady men; our new aristocracy. People say (and I've heard them) "I know it's wrong but there's nothing we can do about it. We'll just have to put up with it."
What happened to us? Did people start believing all that shit Murdoch and his peers pumped out via their propaganda machines? I think too many of us did.
Is it too late to get off our knees, I mean off our sofas parked in front of the lobotomy box?
This is the Broken Britain Cameron's clients and friends have created, but he wants to shift the blame onto their victims. Partial privatisation of institutions such as the NHS has wrecked them, so what's the answer? More privatisation. More downsizing, more on the dole to join the 'feral youth' on the streets looking for easy victims.
Brilliant strategy.

Neoliberalism’s chickens are coming home to roost. Haringey council’s £41 million cuts devastated the borough’s youth provision. Only last month the local MP David Lammy demanded government action to deal with a 10% rise in unemployment in Tottenham was now has 10,514 people seeking work. Local residents have been saying in interviews that thousands of people in their late 20s have never been able to find a job. It’s no surprise then that the shops selling designer sportswear, mobile phones and state of the art TVs and MP3 players are being looted by people who know that they’ll never earn enough to buy these things.
The capitalists can’t have it both ways. On one hand they say you need these things for status and to feel fulfilled and on the other most of the jobs on offer pay poverty wages on short-term contacts.
By contrast the very rich have never had it so good in living memory. The High Pay Commission reported on August 8 that executives in FTSE 100 companies received average annual pensions worth around £175,000. The average British pension is a paltry £5860 and the Con-Dems want to make working people poorer still. At the same time they are hell bent on transferring vast sums of money to the 300 000 people who pay the top rate of 50% tax on earnings over £150 000. London Mayor Boris Johnson has called for it to be scrapped and his millionaire chum George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer has said he wants to get rid of it.

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