Madness

My alarm clock goes straight into some news station, not sure which though, maybe BBC? This is a very distressing way to start your day and I might have to stop it and just use the alarm function instead of radio.
The other day I woke up to the “news” that the Tory back benchers wanted to reduce taxes further. Seriously!

Lower taxes means less money left for public spending, which lead to more cuts in public services. More people will be redundant and less people can afford to buy things and the economy will slow down as a result.
Obviously, the back benchers are only thinking about the amount of money they themselves can pile up by paying less tax, a selfish greed in other words.
When politicians talk about doing something for the economy, you need to ask yourself; whose economy are they talking about, yours or theirs?

Another pie brain of politician then suggested that we reduce the NI. But if the Government are making cuts in spending in order to pay off the national debt then surely a reduction in NI (Government income) will take away any “savings” made by the cuts in spending? Basically the bloody woman just wanted more money in her pocket.

Let us all get some reality check here. Economics has a tendency to regard the world in terms of competition over limited resources and therefore companies need to constantly increase their profit, regardless of the consequences for others. We can see an example of this thinking in the bankers’ greedy and selfish behaviour that led us all into the economical crisis we now find ourselves in.

However, if you look at the world as a place of abundance and where co-operation and compassion becomes the determent for your actions then there will be more for all and all will increase their welfare and standard of living.
Sadly, this is made impossible because of the actions of the selfish, greedy and racist* elite that build their fortunes by exploiting others.
For example, we could read in the papers about the £18bn hidden away in overseas tax heavens by the rich. The Government’s response is to come up with a proposal to make it even easier for the rich to do this! Talk about madness!!!!

I read in Metro the other day about a think tank (who ever that is) that ¼ of all children in Britain will live in poverty by 2020.
And a research into cost of rents by the charity Shelter shows that “ordinary working families face unaffordable private rents in 55% of local authorities in England**. That means that the rent cost more than 1/3 of the total family income.
I find the above facts more disturbing when I read the Sunday Times rich list of 2011 and that Duke of Westminster’s fortune increased with £250 million during the last twelve months and his fortune comes from properties!

I say like Martin Luther King, Jr., “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it”.

This selfish madness by the rich has to stop!
  

* Racism here meaning using biological explanations for their own superior position compare to poor peoples’ inferiority in abilities and therefore lower social/economical position.

** Shelter website

Biological determinism

After Cameron’s and others rants about how to clamp down on the rioters with a firm hand, we can now start to see the facts coming through from the court papers and there are no surprises there.

Despite that Cameron and his friends tried to make us think that the rioters were only ‘mindless criminals’ and not actually rioters, the facts show a different story. Two thirds of the charged came from the poorest areas of the capital and the average distance between the alleged looting and the suspects home was 2.9km*.

The demand from the top on harsh punishment trickles down the society pyramid and the New Scotland Yard Chief Bernard Hogan-Howe (a favourite candidate with the Conservatives) say that he will make criminals fear the police. This is worrying tendencies. Is it not better if the police force starts to behave in a fair and just manner instead so that people will respect them? Hard core policing is never successful because crime stem from unmet needs and appears when huge portions of society is excluded. Fear does not change that.

But sadly, instead of equality it is very clear that the Government make a difference between people and people when two former Conservative peers only had to serve a quarter of their sentence for fiddling their expenses. Why does not Mr Cameron demand the highest punishment for these rich looters as well as for the poor street looters?

I think it is time for the Government and the parliament as a whole to pay attention to the dangers of excluding people from society with their talk about deserving and undeserving people. We are all humans, none of us is more or less!

We need a loud opposition that speak out about what their politics of austerity actually means. I like to quote Daniel Dorling here to make my point clear, ‘if poor people in affluent nations believed that all human beings were alike, then it would not be possible under affluent conditions to justify the exclusion of so many from so many social norms. The majority would find it abhorrent that a large minority should be allowed to live in poverty if they saw that minority as the same sort of people as themselves**.’

The Government is driving a politics based on ideas of elitism and according to this viewpoint some people are seen as inferior. This view is based on a biological determinism that is horribly close to the eugenics of the early twentieth century.

I surely hope we will not end up with concentration camps for the race of the undeserving poor.

Vote the Conservatives out of Government!

*According to Evening Standard: 5 Sept 2001, p6.

**Daniel Dorking, p.103

Clip round the ear

During the August riots we were fed by media about the widespread looting and how youngsters had lost all common sense. Cameron called the rioters for scum and by that managed to dehumanise the youngsters. He made a big number of trying to make us believe that the rioters were criminals rather than angry young people resisting his politics if austerity.
Cameron also wanted swift handling of the rioters and called for water guns and harsh punishments.

In the heat of the riot it can be hard to see what is actually going on and the dust from the battle is still hovering around the court houses where draconian punishments has been handed out. The sentencing frenzy has left the prison services unable to cope with the sudden and drastic increase of prisoners within such a short period of time.

I thought that punishment in UK was based on the particular circumstances of each crime and that all of us are equal before the law. But clearly not, there has been some pre-judgement going on in the media and the emotional fury in Cameron’s statements.

When the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans we also got these media report of looting, violence and rape committed by young black men. But actually these reports were far from the truth. In reality, it was the police that went berserk and killed African Americans at sight. (See link below)

I have a feeling that in some years from now the real truth about what went on during the August riots will come out and it will change the public opinion of the rioters, when the dust have settled, just as it done in New Orleans.

In the aftermath of the riots there has been suggestions to use the practice of ‘clip round the ear’ as a way for the police to deal with the young poor people in UK, or the ‘pockets of our society that are broken’ as Cameron calls it.

Is it not better to mend what’s broken rather than release a racist police force to clamp down on so called thugs with a clip round the ear? Surely that is not the solution?

Clearly we can’t trust the Metropolitan Police Force to deal with the public in a just and fair manner. What we do see instead is blatant racism and a police force that kill black men on our streets. Men like Mark Duggan, Demetre Fraser and others.

Clip round the ear is not a solution because violence breeds violence.

What we need is a society where all have a fair chance to take part in society on equal terms - a society that includes all.

Katrina verdicts, full article

Human rights, democracy and equality

I firmly believe in equal rights for all and therefore also a fair legal system where we are treated the same before the law. Each case should be judged on its own circumstances and the punishment should be fair for all.

It is obvious to me that David Cameron has a different view on human rights, democracy and equality. Despite his talk about how ‘we are in this together’ and his big society the riots has made him reveal his true view on humans. It becomes clear that he view some people as scum and vermin that should be punished by the full force of the law. He says that ‘there are pockets of our society that are broken’ with a collapse of moral values. But when he say this he is not referring to the bankers that looted the global economy or the millionaires steeling from the public with their tax reduction or the MPs’ looting of the taxpayers with their allowances claims.

Instead, his society is populated by worthy people (the rich) and unworthy (the poor) and it scares me to think of what his plans are for the unworthy people. Has his treatment of the rioters set the bar?

In the heat of the riots Cameron came out with his contempt for the unworthy people and now we see how his view has trickled down to the courts and the punishments for the rioters are 25% harsher than usual causing the prison service to struggle to deal with the 700 people that the courts sent to prison. We also hear that parents of rioters are being evicted from council flats, which is also a suggestion of Cameron’s. Since when could you be punished for actions of other people? There is no affordable housing around and young people are forced to stay at home for longer, can these parents really be responsible for these young adults’ actions?

I would like to see Cameron deal with the policemen that killed Mark Duggan just as firmly as he treats the rioters. The police officers in question actually killed a man, it was murder! As far as I know they are still at large in our society, free to do it again. But maybe the Government think it is okay to just kill off the ‘scum’ in this way?

The August riots might have been stopped but the fire is still burning. Cameron has lost touch with the reality some people faces in UK today. More than 50% of the children in Lambeth lives in poverty, black boys are more frequently expelled from school than their white peers, every winter people freeze to death in their flats because they can’t afford their heating costs. The list can go on forever.

Cameron is completely oblivious how it is to live without a trust fund like most of has to do. He should try to live in poverty on a concil estate with no prospect to get a job or an education and then he might change his views.

Riots - London Burning

Thirty years ago the Brixton riots started because of police harassment of black young men by the ‘sus’ laws. Thirty years later new riots are triggered because the police shot a black man dead on the streets of Tottenham. Mark Duggan is not the first casualty of police brutality towards young black men. We have also seen the killing of Smiley Culture during a police raid, Ricky Bishop was killed by police during the Operation Clean Sweep, Demetre Fraser from Peckham died in Police custody in Birmingham and so did Kingsley Burrell. The list can go on forever. No person has been charged for these young men’s deaths!
The shooting of Mark Duggan was not an isolated event.
Black men are still stopped and searched by police and killed in cold blood on our streets. This has to stop!

Over the last few days we have seen the riots spread across England and young men take to the streets to show their anger and frustration. The last time we saw London Burning like this was during Thatcher’s Tory Government. It’s not a coincident that it’s happening again under a Tory Government.
Since Cameron came to power he has put into place a politics of austerity and a moral war against the poor. The unemployment among young people is proportionally higher than in the rest of society, education costs are increased and affordable housing is impossible to find. So yes, young people are angry, particularly the young and poor that are completely excluded from society. (The white middle class youngsters are probably away on nice holidays at the moment.)

I said it before and I say it again; if you don’t share your stability and wealth with the poor then the poor will share their poverty and instability with you. The riots are a spill-over effect of poverty.

The reactions to the riots has been scary, people talk about bringing in the army and mow down the ‘thugs and scum’. Vigilantes have been taking to the streets to ‘defend’ themselves. Some vigilantes were even armed with cricket bats! What were they going to do to a ten year old rioter? Kill him? It’s getting harder to see who is the good guy and who is the baddie in the battle of the streets.

Cameron then break his nice holiday and uses the riots for his own purpose by dehumanizes the angry rioters and talk about bringing in more police armed with baton rounds and water cannons. He also suggested that the Human Right Act will not be seen as a hinder for publishing pictures of suspects! This could seriously harm innocent people and put suspects in danger of vigilante attacks. Cameron needs to stand up and take his responsibility for the crisis his politics of austerity has created.

The middle classes need to wake up to Cameron’s agenda, to bring the poor people down by making people see them as moral deviants and monsters.

The violence is scary and some individual victims have suffered severely but it’s not completely irrational, it does not happen in a vacuum. There is anger in the poor areas and this anger might spread to other parts of society as Cameron’s cut backs are started to affect more people.

Cameron need to sit up and see that we are in this together and that he has the main responsibility for  looking after all people of the country not only his millionaire friends!

Angola III

Yesterday I went for a viewing of the film ‘In the Land of the Free’ (by Vadim Jean) about the three Black Panther members that has been held in solitary confinement for more than thirty years. This is torture and nothing else. The three persons are Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King. King has been released but the other two are still held in solitary confinement.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also called Angola is built on an old slave plantation that was worked by slaves from Angola, therefore the name.

Today it’s a private prison and the prisoners have to work on the field and the prison owner takes the profit and put it in their own pockets. To me that is the same system as the slave plantation system.

The new warden at the prison believes that you cannot repent unless you turn Christian and share his religious faith. Prisoners that join his faith get better treatment than others.

The Angola also has a rodeo where prisoners are fighting the horse or the bull. They have one ‘game’ where four prisoners sits around a table and the person sitting the longest after the bull attack gets $200. I suppose the rodeo crew is awarded privileged treatment in the prison. The ‘game’ reminds me of the roman gladiators in the Coliseum in Rome, in other words an ancient practice.
See rodeo video from Louisiana State Penitentiary website:
Angola Rodeo

The Angola prison is a scary example of what is wrong with privately owned prisons and since HM Prison Service has started to contract out prisons to private companies we can expect the same future in Britain.  

I strongly recommend people to watch the film about the Angola III and to get involved in the fight to get the two remaining Angola III out of Angola and free at last. (See links below)

In The Land of the Free

Amnesty International

Osama Bin Laden

I woke up this morning to the news that US Army have killed Osama Bin Laden and that people are outside the White House celebrating. But what exactly are they celebrating?

According to American Intelligence, Bin Laden was a bit of a superman and he was here and there and everywhere but nobody could catch him, the elusive terrorist leader. How could this thin old man control an organisation stronger and smarter and more advanced than CIA and MI6 from a little hiding place in the mountains of Afghanistan and then later from a villa in Pakistan?

Morgan ‘Super Size Me’ Spurlock has made a funny video on our exaggerated fears.

I guess Spurlock was successful and told the CIA where Bin Laden been hiding...

Now when they have killed this super terrorist leader will we have peace on earth then or what are the Americans celebrating? Will the death of one old man change the world and stop the super organisation Al-Qaida? Does this mean the forces will pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan?  

Bin Laden is gone and other than that the world is still the same place and the people in power are still playing their little propaganda and power game.

See my further views on terrorism in my other blog Shit Happens

The F-word

When I moved to England from Sweden I was shocked to realise that feminism was seen by many as extremism. How can the fight for equal rights be seen as fanatical?

But after living in the UK for more than thirteen years I have realised that the history of feminism in England has been more violent than in Sweden.

In England, the suffragettes had to go to extreme measures to make their voices heard in a society where they had no right to speak in public. Not that I really think it is extreme to chain yourself to the gates of Buckingham Palace.

The suffragettes were facing strong resistance from the established society and that meant that they were forced to constantly raise the stakes to make their voices heard. The state responded with the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (Prisoners, Temporary Discharge for Health Act), which was a very effective way for the state to deal with the suffragettes. The men in power were not going to give up their powers and since the people in power make the laws, they used the laws to increase their powers against the suffragettes.

When the oppression of a group has become extreme then the resistance has to be extreme. You can see evidence of this political struggle against oppression all over the world; we have seen it in Iran, Iraq and now lately in Egypt and Libya.

It is easy to forget that the suffragettes were just women fighting for their right to vote and be recognised as a legal person in their own right and not just as some ones daughter or wife. They were not some mentally deranged lunatics that made no sense. And they were certainly not extreme in their actions!

Today, feminism is seen as something old fashion and out of date as if the oppression of women has stopped and women should stop nagging about equality, we have moved passed that now. But have we? Is the issue really out of date?

The 5^th March 2011, I joined the Million Women Rise march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square on the anniversary of the International Women’s Day. The march was to end the male violence against women and children and the Statement of Demands is not out of date or old fashion, it is a fair demand for justice for women and our equal right to be protected by the state from violence.

 

Don’t be afraid to use the word Feminism - do it with pride!

Join the struggle for women rights:

• Million Women March
• Fawsett Society
• Object

Reading the news again

Why do I never learn? I read the blooming papers again and now I am completely depressed and lost the will to live...

First of all, I think Cameron can stuff his bloody Big Society somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine. Basically this is the largest rip off and privatisation scheme since Margaret Thatcher. Cameron and his fellow millionaires in the Government has come up with this master plan of a huge mega car boot sale of the public resources that in effect is a closing down the state, to bargain prices for the rich.

Hands off the NHS, education and our forests. This is not for Cameron to sell because it is not his property; it belongs to the people of Britain and its taxpayers.

The Government scare the councils by setting hard cuts in their budget and they go into some sort panic sale as well and sell off our libraries, supportive housing and public buildings.

The localism in Cameron’s Big Society sounds like a grand scheme to leave people to fend for themselves as best as they can, a state of ‘the survival of the fittest’. He creates a hard core capitalism and move us back to the times when the aristocrats ruled on the backs of the rest of the people.

The localism will be hardest felt when it comes to NHS changes where the GPs will be in charge of 80% of the budget that the Primary Care Trusts used to manage. That means that each GP will get a petty cash box to use for their clients so next time you go to your GP you might be told, ‘sorry mate but the money is finished and you can’t have any treatment for your cancer. You could try to get it privately or maybe you have private health insurance that might cover for it? Otherwise you will have to wait until next budget year, it’s only seven months away and you might be able to get treatment then but only if you put yourself on our waiting list. If you are lucky the cancer has not spread that much by then.’

What is so flaming Big about that type of society?

I then moved on and read about the huge pay some people in public office rakes in, despite economic crisis. I mean the BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons claimed £12,000 in expenses alone. That is more than most people earn per year! And then I read that the Council bosses earn more than £185K! Blimey, that can cover the housing benefits for a family for 336 month (28 years) or four families for 7 years!  I have said it before and I say it again, the problem is not lack of money it is the distribution of money that is the problem.

As if that was not enough, the sodding sport commentators at Sky Sport go and verbalise their sexism on air! And why is that men thinks that the epitome of intelligence is the offside rule, which any bloody moron can understand. It is not exactly complicated like splitting an atom or like string theory, is it? Big up for Sky to sack the chauvinist pigs and gets them off the air!

Then I saw a front page in Evening Standard: ‘Tory MP blasts feminists bigots’. In the article you could read that MP Dominic Raab said feminists are ‘obnoxious bigots’. He thinks it is time for men to burn their briefs. What planet is he from, the same as ET?

All I have to do now is to come up with a great plan to kick the Government out of the office of power. Any ideas?

Cameron’s New Year

Cameron told us in his New Year’s speech that we have a hard year ahead of us with cuts in public services. He try to tell us this is for the people and that we are “in this together”, which is rather a lie. What his plans means is that the poor pay and the millionaires in the Government and their rich friends remains more or less unaffected by the cuts. The conclusion is that people to Cameron is only people above a certain income level, the rest of us are just riff-raff.

The VAT increase will hit the poor the hardest. If you are on minimum wages, disability benefits or unemployed then the increase of VAT will eat into your already small amount of money. As a result, poor people will have to cut down on food and necessities and the children living below the poverty line will increase.

I find it immoral of a Government to neglect its people so brutally. It is almost like the way Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette neglected the starving people in France. Cameron should be concerned about creating a too large tension between rich and poor.

Yes, there is an economical crisis and we do need to take actions but the question is; what actions do we need to take? I suggest we stop the lavish spending on keeping the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, curtail bankers pay and bonuses, increase taxes on incomes above 80K. My point is the problem is not lack of money; it is the distribution of the wealth that is the problem. Poverty is only possible when the few take more than they are due. Poverty is not an immorality that needs to be punished; it is a consequence of an unequal society.

We are not in this together because if you are poor you suffer more than if you are rich. Cameron’s talk about togetherness therefore becomes very hollow.

Cameron’s plan to ruin the NHS with his silly plans of what he calls reforms. But the word reform implicates improvement and Cameron’s plans will certainly not improve NHS, instead it will make it harder for people living in poor areas to get equal access to NHS as people in rich areas. The NHS plans combine with the movement to move poor people out from rich areas makes the inequality even worse.

The inequality in access to public services makes me think about Rousseau and the Social Contract. My question is why should the poor people living in a poor area with less access to public services pay the same tax as the rich people with higher access to public services?

When you add the silly suggestion to allow employers to sack “underachievers” that do not meet their targets during their first two years of employment, the situation becomes very grim!

2,498,000 people in the UK are unemployed and if you add all the people on long term sickness, ESA, lone parents and carers to the mix, then we talk about a lot of people. When these people try to get into the work market they will face these new insecure employment contracts. Obviously, the employers will purposely set their target very high and then the workers will underachieve, which allows the employer to sack people as they please. This will leave people at their mercy and it will also make it very difficult for the young people to build up any good pension qualification because they will struggle to make the necessary working years required.

Cameron also plans to stop the right to claim housing benefits if you live in popular central areas. Cameron say They should be moved to the cheaper areas, which means far from work places with increased travel costs and up-root children at a point when the family already suffers hardship.

Cameron also suggests people should lose benefits if They do not take the jobs! But if he increases the cost of studying it will lead to an increase in uneducated people. Who will employ these uneducated people? Just because there are jobs available does not mean that the unemployed are qualified to do the jobs available.

Cameron also would like to limit the time people can live in social housing. Surely, that would result in families being up-rooted and children from vulnerable families being forced to change schools and friends, which will put an increased pressure on people unable to pay the bankers high rents. The result, which might be what Cameron actually is after, would be a creation of migrant workers that can be used by the rich as cheap labour. How convenient for them.

The Government’s We (the rich) and Them (the poor) mentality is frightfully similar to the propaganda broadcasted in Rwanda before the Hutus genocide of the Tutsis, claiming the Tutsis were evil, whipping up hatred in people against Them. To talk in terms of ‘we and them’ by politicians is dangerous. Cameron is creating myths about how bad the others are, which in this case is the poor and lazy welfare cheats and spongers! It reminds me of how the Irish migrants were viewed during the potato famine. The poverty was seen as the Irish’ fault and God’s punishment for low morale!

His propaganda against Them makes us focus on the wrong “baddies” and takes away attention from the real parasites in society, the rich that take their wealth to tax paradises to avoid paying their dues.

Cameron’s politic is aiming to create a poverty dispersal system were all poor people will be forced to move to the outskirts of the major cities and to live in some sort of ghettos. We have to resist and stop these wicked plans of the Government before it is too late.

The Government and their supporters need to sit up and reflect that if you do not share your stability with the poor then the poor will share their poverty and instability with you. You could call this a spill-over effect of poverty and Somalia is a good example of this, where the poverty had created the Somalia piracy.

Greed and selfishness in the “free” market is irrational because you cannot take without giving back or it will come back and bite your ass.

The International bankers have become the new aristocracy and they should be made to pay their fair share of the burden of the crisis. Not just use the society and the market as a play ground for the rich. To the rich as say, “Neglect the poor on your own peril.” 

Happy New Year!

The social services have housed my friend Maria in a hostel in Westminster to keep her safe from her abusive and unsafe home environment. She is what social services used to call a young vulnerable person.

Two weeks before Christmas Maria called me and told me that she had been evicted from the hostel. Apparently the hostel is closing down because the council do not want residents in the borough living below a certain income level!

So that is how the richer boroughs are going to solve the cuts and the economical crisis. Just kick the poor people out! Well, that should solve the problem nicely.

Send the poor to the poor councils and do as they done in Paris with their growing ghettos in the outskirts of Paris with their annual riots and where young girls walking alone are seen as fair game for gang rape. That should sort the poor out and force them of their lazy backs and give them a nice incentive to work.

As if poverty is a moral defect rather than a result of the unequal power structures in the country.

What the Government and its millionaire MPs are trying to do is to increase their wealth on the back of others’ work and the poor. Cameron keep on saying we are in this together but actually, some people has to take the blunt of the cut backs whilst others continue to attend their glitzy Champaign parties asking themselves “where is this economical crisis everybody is talking about?”

The overall assets of a country belong to its people in an equal share but the Government is building a society where the rich take from the poor and give to rich.

Cameron needs to be aware of that when you neglect the poor you do it on your own peril. It is just so much a person can put up with. I do not think that poor people silently will sit at home and starve to death. There will be a point when you have to fight back. That fight can take the form of increasing demonstrations but also riots and crime waves. If you are locked out from all avenues to earn your money by working, you will have to take it from those who stack their wealth on piles in tax havens such as Cayman Islands, Guernsey and Liechtenstein.

The Tory Government will bring us back to a pre-industrialism relationship between the rich and the poor and as history told us this will lead to revolution, social unrest and famine.

The rich are completely alien to the state of the country to the point where Prince Charles and his darling Camilla goes for a drive to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in their royal car straight through the well known and planned student demonstration. Completely oblivious to the fact that the streets of London would be filled of young people fighting for their right to education and their right to be able to make a decent living and that the posh royal car gliding past would be a sore eye. The photo with Camilla’s face in a complete shock and surprise is just a proof of how distant the rich are from the harsh reality of the people. What did she expect? That the commoners would take a break in the demonstration to cheerfully wave at her on her route to her free ticket at the Royal Variety Performance?

I do wish we all could have a Happy New Year but I am afraid that will not happen as long as we have a Tory Government.

Robin Hood where are you when we need you?