Austerity and the Independent Living Fund - Inhumane Bureaucracy and Lies.

A friend of mine, who is wheel chair bound as a result of her life long disability, has been told that both her care provided by care workers and her Independent Living Fund will be reduced.

Savings must be made. She must live a more austere life for the sake of the Nation's Finances.

The Independent Living Fund is being cut back, for purely ideological reasons. Her life is being curtailed for purely ideological reasons.

Here is her statement:

"I am an absolute wreck today! Finally saw a Social Worker yesterday about the impending closure of the Independent Living Fund, which Social Services are supposed to replace - they are proposing to not only Not replace my ILF Care (7 hrs per day), but to reduce the care they themselves currently give me, from 5 hrs per day to just three, and worst of all to put me into adult nappies to 'increase my independence'(!), as I won't then have to depend on anyone taking me to the toilet during the day or the night!

I am devastated! They say they will also refer me to the health team as they may be able to provide some other interventions and may even provide me with some care....

It's all so demeaning, dehumanising & wrong & utterly, devastatingly traumatising! I don't know how I or anyone else is supposed to function. Saying that, I think that is exactly the point! They don't want us to function, so we cannot challenge & contribute to society and the debates on welfare, the NHS, etc., etc! They want us to be dead, or at the very least to be silent & hidden away from society!

And this doesn't just affect me, but my carers too, who will lose some or all of their livelihood - one of my carers is a single mum: you cannot imagine how bad I feel about how this is going to hit them all, especially her & her daughter! And, as if this isn't bad enough, Osborne is also considering cutting Child Tax Credits, which are paid to people who are already in work, further cutting & hitting poor people with children who are working & struggling to survive & to provide for their children.

I feel like a bear in a trap & want to chew off my own hand so I can escape! I think maybe I should give them what they want & die - what use is living anyway? Thousands have already died* and even still, most people, most of my friends included, are not yet aware of the terror of this situation and are blithely getting on with their own lives oblivious of the fact that their voices & actions are vital & crucial to changing this situation. How many more must die before enough of the population dare to care enough to stop this happening? 

This living on handouts is soul destroying at the best of times, when they propose to start hitting you from every direction & you don't know how hard they're going to hit you, or from which direction, or how long for & how many times and you are trapped & have to just wait in agony of anticipation & fear, it is the most unbearable & exquisite torture. I'm being hit by the closure of the ILF & loss of the care support I depend on to live with dignity & independence & which enables me to participate & contribute to society, as well as the ending of Income Support & DLA, without knowing if I will even get anything from ESA or PIP to replace them....

I don't know how much longer I can keep going, or how I'm going to cope, or how much more pain and loss & fear & worry I can bear! I just keep crying and/or trying not to cry!!

In essence, my friend is being asked to sit with her feces and urine next to her skin until a care worker attends to her, some hours later.

How does sitting in you own feces and urine foster dignity for one's life?

How can this be called ‘support’ and how can anyone suggest that this will increase her independence?

Where is the caring empathy of the strong for the vulnerable?

What kind of bullying bureaucracy can drive an official to even make such a suggestion?

‘Austerity’ translates into willfully ignoring the pain, stress and fear created by the way these policies are being implemented, in the pursuit of purely ideological aims.

This is but one of many tens of thousands of similar incidents, all 100% avoidable.

Our Government is behaving with cruelty towards vulnerable people.

It has no mandate to enact this kind of situation, this kind of cruelty. Nor does it have any evidence that the Austerity Cuts are necessary.

Indeed there is ample evidence suggesting otherwise, published by right, center and left wing media.

Our Government is behaving with cruelty towards vulnerable people in pursuit of ideological aims.

Those Government Ministers, Civil Servants and Advisors who initiate and design the implementation of this policy are acting on personal prejudice and that is a psychological problem, a matter of personal dysfunction intruding into Governance.

We are being ruled by sick people.

And it would appear that morally weak and vulnerable people being put to work to implement that policy.

Would Iain Duncan Smith or David Cameron sit in their own feces and urine as they debated the issues of the day in Parliament? 

Would you?

Why is Iain Duncan Smith fighting a legal battle to withold Government data on deaths of disabled people that are correlated to this 'austerity' campaign?

Disabled people and their carers are trying to hold the Government to account. Will you help them?

Petition to protect the Independent Living Fund

and

Tomorrow, Wednesday 24th June a group of disabled people will go to Parliament to lobby the Government.

You can follow what happens through their facebook page.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Magna Carta, fables and misrepresentations.

There appears to be some variance in the interpretation of Magna Carta.

As I understand it, Magna Carta was a contract, drawn up by the Barons and the Catholic Bishops, setting out the relationship between the three ruling hierarchies - The Church, The Monarchy and The Barons. It had a number of versions, and all were abrogated or broken by the signing parties sooner or later.

Ordinary folk were not included. 

That same relationship persists today, with unelected Bishops in the House of Lords, unelected Lords in the House of Lords, Corporate Barons in the House of Lords as well as Corporate influence over the MPs in the House of Commons and those who form the Government of the day.

The Monarchy stands as a symbol of National Unity and National internalised Identity. 

The only articles from Magna Carta that are currently on the statute books, and thus active in Law, are the two which relate to the position of the Church and the City of London, both of which imply an acceptance of the status of the Monarchy as Head of State.

The reason why proportional representation or any other genuinely democratic voting system does not exist is to preserve that triumvirate of Power. You can vote, yet you have no real say in how laws are made, and what laws are made. You and I, dear reader, are excluded from the exercise of political and economic power. That is deliberate. Your vote is engineered to be impotent.

Cameron words must be read with that understanding...

"It falls to us in this generation to restore the reputation of those rights... It is our duty to safeguard the legacy, the idea, the momentous achievement of those barons."

This coming from a leader who is overseeing the privatisation of the NHS, who bombed Libya needlessly, whose Government is placing psychologists in Job Centers to mask the bureaucratic bullying of vulnerable people in pursuit of an ideological stance that is fundamentally institutionalised cruelty and utterly inhumane. Austerity is a lie. Austerity is Tory bullying of the vulnerable writ large.

What is the legacy of the Barons?

It certainly is not genuine participative democracy for all the people, where the people are treated as equals in the discussions and processes of decision making at the level of Governance.

Is the privatisation of the NHS into the hands of people associated with David Cameron's Cabinet and social class mandated by the people of the UK?

Or is it closer to the kind of trade controls the Barons would have seen as appropriate to their standing?

Was the bombing of Libya mandated by the UK electorate? Likewise the invasion of Iraq in 2003?

They were not. Indeed there is very little of Government legislation in recent history that has been fully supported by the majority of the electorate in the UK.

I could be wrong.

I also know that Government has been undermining those constituencies that were behind the Power Inquiry of 2006 through the Big Society campaign.

This is because they - the Community Voluntary Sector (CVS) - presented the most cogent, well articulated and well reasoned appraisal of the flaws in the current systems of governance, flaws which render it un-democratic. 

Take for example the Office of The Party Whip, and anti-democratic institution which has no place in a genuine peoples Democracy.

The Power Inquiry proposed a series of proven, tested and tried reforms that would safely devolve decision making powers to the grass roots of Society through deliberative processes that would build bridges rather than create divisions.

The CVS had decades of self governance experience to draw from - dealing with provision of services, listening and responding to clients, managing funding and treasury transparency, dealing with Government and European bodies and legislation, handling crises, developing evidence based policies and implementing those... a vast body of experiential knowledge and wisdom, with a more defined and exact database than currently exists for climate change as a direct result of only fossil fuel use.

I also understand that Government and the Establishment ruling class do place activists to distract, dissuade, and otherwise obscure the realities of history in order to confuse the activities of genuine activism, as a standard practice that has a long, long history.

There is much talk of Freemen, of Maritime Law, of Natural Law and of supposed rights of ordinary people inferred in Magna Carta that generates much attention, yet delivers nothing useful in terms of Democratic progress towards a more humane system of Governance.

The lack of delivery of anything useful is the proof of the pudding.

Here is a song that explores the idea that before the emergence of Kings (the original knife crime syndicates) human culture was Egalitarian, for the vast majority, because it is a highly evolved state of being, one that assured human communities would flourish and thrive over hundreds of thousands of years.

Industrial Hierarchy of Violence Culture is less than 300 years old, and is already threatening all living systems on this gorgeous planet with enhanced toxicity, multiple extinctions and vast harms to people and place. We would do well to remember who we really are.

I write songs like this because part of folk music is the honest recording of the lived experience in history as it really occurred, as a source of wisdom and strength. That is a core duty of the folk musician.

A good friend of mine commented that "Half the pieces on the chess board carry the same title as those who sit in the Lords..."

To which I replied...

"The key skill in Chess is predicting your opponents moves into the future, and then laying a trap for them to fall into through your own moves."

Government policy appears to be short term in the manner it is announced, yet behind the scenes that is not the case. We know that those who rule present an acceptable persona, a façade for public attention and consumption.

Our activism has to understand this, read past the headlines, and perceive what is coming and plan for it whilst being ready to adapt and change.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Working Mothers, Hard Working Families and Power Establishments

Working Mothers and Hard Working Families

"Working Mothers" implies that Mothering is not work worthy of remuneration or reward or support. The mother must also work and pay taxes and contribute to the 'economy'. Otherwise she is a 'shirker'.

Healthy empathic parenting is a profound contribution, not only to our social economy, (albeit a different kind of economy) but also to world peace, human dignity and the creation of a loving society. It is probably the most important contribution of all.

"Hard Working Families" implies putting the children to 'good' economic use... that the children must submit to the demands of the 'economy' as a matter of primary importance. They must be trained, from the earliest age possible, to work hard for the economy.

"The psychology of any given family, community, Institution or Society is both revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat the children and the most vulnerable. Change that and you can change everything."

The question then is what changes does Government policy intend in terms of long term outcomes?

There is a biologically mandated experiential process of bonding between mother and child that is absolutely the core of how the child develops self empathy, empathy for others, and that most healthy sense of self and of autonomy which underpins true co-operation and nurturing, and the degree to which this process - attachment - is stressed or disrupted correlates very strongly with adverse outcomes in later life, often emerging as behavioural issues in youth, dysfunctional relationships or serious health issues in mid life.

This affects both men and women. We are all born of the womb. All of us.

Within the womb, if our mother is subjected to chronic stress or trauma our physiological and psychological development is adversely affected. Mothers are advised by Government Health Departments to quit smoking, to cease drinking alcohol. This is healthy advice.

Research has revealed that any air-borne pollutants the mother is exposed to are concentrated in the developing baby's body by up to 100 times the levels within the mother. The same applies to any pollutant, such as pesticides, additives, colourants and so on.

Why then does Government enact social and economic policies that have been proven to induce chronic stress for mothers rather than enact policies that not only reduce chronic stress but also increase dignity, peace, safety and happiness for mothers, and their children, knowing full well the adverse outcomes of chronic stress on both mother and child?

What is the effect of the Iraq Invasion and war on the mothers of Iraq and their children? Ask this question in relation to any war mongering, in relation to the Arms Industry which is so heavily subsidised by Governments.

The Dominating Society - the Ruling Elite, Corporate, State and Religious Institutions - feel threatened by that natural process of empathic development because it is also part of the development of the clearest sense of justice, and it is part of the development of personal autonomy, and empathy and it is clear that the intent behind Government policy (and much Religious Indoctrination) is to deepen the Governments ability to exercise control over people by inducing chronic stressors that will reduce empathy, making people more susceptible to psychological manipulation and further atomise communities, thus reducing the perceived threat.

Mothering is a critical role in human relationships, and deserves full evidence based support, which should include support for empathic fathering and parenting in general.

We do not need to work more and parent less.

There is more than enough wealth  in our systems to go around to cover all living human beings true needs, and then some.

The then some is the intentional creation of a kinder, more empathic and robustly just social reality where people are nurtured, given dignity, enabled to live lives that are peaceful, loving, co-operative and nurturing, even across variations in culture, faith, outlook, mirroring the natural diversity and creativity and fecundity we see in biology, in nature.

What's not to like about that?

Power and languaging.

"Under Disability Living Allowance, applicants who could not walk 50 metres unaided qualified.

But as a result of David Cameron's benefits cull, the threshold has now been reduced to 20 metres."

Those alterations were made by accountants, financial advisors and statisiticians suggesting that a reduction in the test length would create savings in expenditure which is the bottom line of the Governments actions.

The effects on real human beings is omitted from that analysis.

When those effects become apparent, the refusal to adjust the limits becomes an act of Institutional Cruelty.

The psychology behind this is known as 'Scientific Management', a factory based management approach that is wholly unsuited to real human beings. Hence the language of 'benefits units'.

In Nuremburg a new wording was heard - 'office language' aka bureaucratic language - which the German bureaucracy used to ignore the human realities.

"In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann was asked, “Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people to their death?” And Eichmann answered very candidly, “To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy.”

His interviewer asked what that language was, and Eichmann said, “My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache – ‘office talk.'” When asked for examples, Eichmann said, “It's basically a language in which you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, ‘Why did you do it?' you say, ‘I had to.' ‘Why did you have to?' ‘Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'


The Nazi's won WWII. The ideology won, in spite of the rhetoric.

The same psychology, languaging and approach dominates Government in the UK and the US, and in many other places.

As this example reveals....

Paralympic teen to lose mobility car because she's not disabled enough

Changes to benefits rules mean Kayleigh Haggo, 16, no longer qualifies for her car - because she can walk 20 metres unaided.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

The Dysfunctional Family and the kind of politics of Power I abhor.

I have often written that the dominant structures of political, economic and religious power seem to behave in patterns that are similar to a dysfunctional family within which abuse occurs.

A thought experiment  on Political Role Play: Can you identify Politicians and sectors of the electorate who demonstrate any of these behaviours?

Pick a descriptive sentence from the list below, preface it with a politician, and a link to a story or comment they have made that reveals the behaviour pattern.

• "Using" (destructively narcissistic parents who rule by fear and conditional love)

• Abusing (parents who use physical violence, or emotionally, or sexually abuse their children)

• Perfectionist (fixating on order, prestige, power, and/or perfect appearances, while preventing their child from failing at anything)

• Dogmatic or cult-like (harsh and inflexible discipline, with children not allowed, within reason, to dissent, question authority, or develop their own value system)

• Inequitable parenting (going to extremes for one child while continually ignoring the needs of another)

• Deprivation (control or neglect by withholding love, support, necessities, sympathy, praise, attention, encouragement, supervision, or otherwise putting their children's well-being at risk)

• Abuse among siblings (parents fail to intervene when a sibling physically or sexually abuses another sibling)

• Abandonment (a parent who willfully separates from their children, not wishing any further contact, and in some cases without locating alternative, long-term parenting arrangements, leaving them as orphans)

• Appeasement (parents who reward bad behavior—even by their own standards—and inevitability punish another child's good behavior in order to maintain the peace and avoid temper tantrums "Peace at any price")

• Loyalty manipulation (giving unearned rewards and lavish attention trying to ensure a favored, yet rebellious child will be the one most loyal and well-behaved, while subtly ignoring the wants and needs of their most loyal child currently)

• "Helicopter parenting" (parents who micro-manage their children's lives and/or relationships among siblings—especially minor conflicts)

• "The deceivers" (well-regarded parents in the community, likely to be involved in some charitable/non-profit works, who abuse or mistreat one or more of their children)

• "Public image manager" (sometimes related to above, children warned to not disclose what fights, abuse, or damage happens at home, or face severe punishment "Don't tell anyone what goes on in this family")

• "The paranoid parent" (a parent having persistent and irrational fear accompanied by anger and false accusations that their child is up to no good or others are plotting harm)

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Empathy and a sense of justice : the true threat to hegemonic Power.

I think that Empathy is a biologically mandated ability, a complete embodied sensory capability, that enables an organism to read the world, the environment that is lived in.

It is learned,through experience, initially, in human beings and primates, and probably all mammals, through the experience of being treated with empathy as an infant...

Self empathy in human beings is self understanding in a complete, embodied and pre-verbal way that can also be verbalised or expressed or articulated, as well as projected into others as a sensory capability. The feeling comes first, before the words.

Very useful indeed in the bush, jungle, desert etc in terms of discerning what is useful, nurturing or harmful.

Absolutely necessary for healthy human relationships.

Hunting demands empathy and calm.

Parent demands empathy and calm.

The core of empathy is in self empathy, from which empathy for others develops out of the acute sensitivity that self empathy is.

With that sense of self comes a sense of autonomy and of course, a sense of justness (or justice).

In terms of optimal human biological health for individuals, families, communities and societies, these qualities are core components, essential in all respects.

In terms of Hierachically Violent Societies and Institutions, these qualities represent a direct threat to the psychology of Power that Rules over the people.

It is this that lies underneath the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from any decision making process on matters that affect their lives enacted by conquests inheritors who rule today across the Earth, and it lies behind the careful manipulation of selected assimilated Aboriginals to push for deeper assimilation.

The 'good indian' vs the 'bad indian'; 'hard working families' vs 'benefits scoungers'. We are at 'war'; they are 'terrorists'.

And it's also why so many so-called Democracies refuse to move towards a truly participative Democracy that empowers the shared responsibilities of Power across the grass roots.

Empathy and a sense of justice : the true threat to hegemonic Power.

And with the emergence of the internet as a forum for exchange and dissemination honest experience and insight, as well as leading research formerly locked away from public view within Academia,  the democractisation of information has led to a surge of empathy and a greater articulation of the felt sense of injustice.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe