Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too.  UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.

BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?

Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to *peak your interest, dear reader. 

*(A dear reader pointed out my spelling error, I used the incorrect word. I ought to have used 'pique' - thank you Bernie Hastie on Facebook...) 

I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.

This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'. 

To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters. 

Reading Mo Stewart's Paper will, I believe,  inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.

It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often. 

https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf

Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract

"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work. 

This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments. 

I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.

Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment

Introduction

The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs. 

Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).

Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state. 

Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.

Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis

The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) . 

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).

Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need. 

The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."

~

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...

~

In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well. 

Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms. 

I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population. 

Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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Belief, Poverty, Death and COVID19

"The Government are committed to tackling child poverty." 

This tweet articulates a simple statistic.

Number of foodbanks in the UK:

2004 - 1
2008 - 22
2011 - 100
2012 - 252
2019 - 2,030 (1.6m food parcels)

It doesn’t have to be this way. That’s why I’ll continue fighting. You should too.

— Hasan Patel 🌹 (@CorbynistaTeen) December 29, 2019

Foodbanks have increased since 2004, and the need has grown more rapidly since 2010. Low wages and benefit changes including sanctions are the driving factors in this enlargement of need. A huge escalation has occurred in 2020. Foodbanks and their growth are a signal that ordinary folk care about each other, and that the Ruling class care little for the lowest income class, the most economically vulnerable.

The UK, allied to the US Military Giant, invaded another Sovereign State, Iraq  in 2003 on the pretext of a lie. Foodbank use started to grow after that.

Billions of UK Taxpayers funds have been wasted in UK/US sponsored bloodletting ever since. Where has all the money gone? It did not go to workers. It did not go to veterans. It did not go to the British people. It did not go to the British children. Some shareholders and CEOs made a lot of money out of this.

Foodbanks and Warfare.

Both are wholly avoidable phenomena. Both are the results of bad Government policy.

Poverty has been deliberately exacerbated by this run of Caring Conservative Governments since 2010.

It is also true, to be fair, that neither New Labour nor Conservative and Unionist or indeed Conservative - Liberal Democrat Coalition governments have ever had a policy of Abolishing Poverty, which is, to my mind,  the only sound, socially adept, humane and logical policy stance possible in a 21st Century Democracy.

To allow poverty to persist is a deliberate cruelty.

Reducing poverty merely maintains poverty, and that is a political choice that serves the owners, the Oligarchies, who make profits from low wages and who use poverty and destitution as behavioural nudges, whips that allow them to dominate the working population. Maintaining poverty harms the people as a whole.

The Minimum Wage is a very bad joke, a lie, a deceit. It is an act of cruelty.

This is an abuse dynamic and it is also masked by a key Christian ideological dynamic, one which underlies Capitalism.

"The poor you will always have with you" Matthew 26:11 is a core teaching of Christianity, we are told.

Jesus said so, it is written. There is, of course, no prima facie evidence He did say this. But it has been written so. And he was not the only one. It is previously mentioned in Deuteronomy.

"England is a Christian Nation" said Theresa May. She did say that. It is recorded in Hansard. There is no record in Hansard of any British Prime Minister proposing a policy of abolishing poverty. The Bible and Hansard are in accord, they are congruent. The poor you will always have with you.

Deuteronomy 15:11

For there will never cease to be poor in the land; that is why I am commanding you to open wide your hand to your brother and to the poor and needy in your land.

Mark 14:7

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them whenever you want. But you will not always have Me.

John 12:8

The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me."

And in the hands of the Merchant Puritan, whose sponsorship built great Churches, invented Racism, provided Colonial conquest with a cover story, that teaching became Wealth is God's sign of approval, Poverty is His sign of  disapproval, and therefore Poverty is obviously a personal flaw, a sin of the poor, rather than the structural imposition that it really is.

Colston's Charity assuages guilt without correcting the problem.

Sir Edward Colston's statue stood the test of time, only because successive generations venerated his philanthropy over honesty in History.

Prosperity Gospel and New Age Abundance ideology are variations of the same toxic thinking. The arrogance and delusion of the billionaire class, the beautiful people, is that they believe that are innately superior to the ordinary folk, and that their innate superiority is why they are so wealthy.

Burning £50 notes in front of homeless rough sleepers. Spaffing £53 million on a paper bridge to nowhere. Spaffing £12 million on an already unworkable contact tracing app, when a free and entirely functional version was already available and on offer. Someone trousered a lot of cash for nothing. Value for money?

A very public school boy aptitude, and such teachings were also aimed at the patriotic working class who were urged to move up the property ladder, who were  conned into servicing debt (£1.8 trillion as we write today, and rising) to gain wealth, to convince them of their own worthiness, to assert their innate superiority, and to underpin the inferiority of those who are forced to endure poverty, or who come to this country to do the essential but low paid work. People who are then blamed for 'stealing our jobs'.

The 'comedic' abuse of Little Britain, and 'edutainments' such as 'Benefits Street' and others serve to embed that discrimination, disguised as culture, into the patriotic consciousness. Shop for Britain.

Laughing at, rather than with, the vulnerable. Very British.

Iain Duncan Smith opposes Universal Basic Income as one method to assist the working population through the worst of the Corona Virus epidemic on the basis that it will work as a disincentive to work.

Treasury officials claim that furlough has become an addiction.

Boris Johnson hopes the virus will go away, urges that we get back to work before it is eliminated from the population.

He means 'we the workers' given that his personal work rate is minimal for someone in his position.

He also has the happy arrogance of assumed immunity. The Reaper passed him by. I am glad of that for his sake, and for the sake of his fiance and new child. That does not mean I am glad he is in office. How could this be, knowing what he is participating in, understanding the harm it is causing?

Gavin Williamson tried to bully parents, students and teachings by shaming them with the distress his Governments policies are creating for many people, as emotional blackmail.

Ministers have misled,  lied and gaslighted the public.

Observing this one is drawn to the conclusion that this is indeed an abusive relationship dynamic, posing as a system of Democratic Governance.

150,000 excess deaths over a decade.

60,000 excess deaths over a 4 month first wave of an epidemic.

All wholly avoidable, all caused by UK Government policy.

An abuse dynamic if ever I have seen one. 

This begs the question, what on earth is happening within the UK? Why is this being allowed to continue? Who is responsible for this?

Corona Virus Policy variations, Evidence, Belief and Opinion.

The worlds best researchers in epidemiology, public health science and health and social care are an international, supra national collective of serious minded, open minded people whose entire focus is evidence based.

New Zealand Government studied the work and  the experience of that community with regards to COVID19,  and they took action based on that evidence and experience.

The New Zealander people are now free of the virus - it is not being transmitted person to person within the population - apart from two British residents who imported it as they were allowed entry to see a dying parent, and who are now in treatment and isolation, along with c.300 people they might have infected - and New Zealand economy is strong. It took the New Zealanders, Government and people together, 11 weeks to achieve this happy state. They remain vigilant.

The UK Government chose a different path. Deliberately. Just as they continue to choose not to abolish poverty. Just as they chose to invade Iraq.

They chose to game the virus to rerig the economy in Shock Doctrine fashion. The policy is obviously not based on evidence, rather it is based on a belief, an opinion. But what belief, what opinion?

That choice has caused 60,000+ excess deaths in 4 months.

The policy decisions of the UK Government have caused a whole other bunch of problems that have exacerbated the situation.

Deliberate choices.

PPE shortages, sending patients back into care homes, permitting care workers to move from facility to facility, no provision of Fever Hospitals, focus on home made contact trace apps when there already were apps up and running and offered for free, in Europe, repetitive patterns of wasteful expenditure that did not stop the spread, rather each new policy decision guaranteed the spread, in toto imposing shut down without much effort to stop the spread or to provide fullest support to the  people going through the shut down, easing their pre-existing burdens, lying all the time, even going as far as gaslighting the public.

The UK Government and it's sponsors - Robert Mercer, Arron Banks, right wing Hedge Funders, Cambridge Analytica et al - have been very carefully blaming those problems on the virus and the people, there has been a dedicated online campaign across many platforms to whisper in people's ears this narrative of the Hoax, the Chinese Virus, the Flu, the NWO across New Ager, Alt-right and Christian networks of influence.

All designed to groom vulnerable and gullible targets into breaking the stay home, stay safe protocol so that they can be blamed for any resurgent peaks. And of course, being arrogant, the believers are falling for the play.

It takes humility to stand on evidence, to eschew opinion and belief.

The arrogance of the the believers and the opinionated walking hand in hand with the callous cruelty of the Establishment whilst they believe, crying "Freedom!" and "Take Back Control!" that they are resisting the Establishment.

Satire or Irony are inadequate to this horrific situation.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

Thank you for reading this blog.

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Remembering : All War is Child Abuse.

all war is child abuse

a poem for 1919 - 2019

"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."

It is also a song.

I try to 'remember' aware that I am placed within an historical context, a point between what has happened and what will happen, in the present, the place of happening, which is here and now.

I am aware I am here because so many organisms have lived, nurtured and died.

We are all here as a result of the evolution of  living systems.
 
And in this time, Remembrance Sunday in particular, I turn towards every ancestor ever murdered in warfare, every family bombed out of their home, every child shot in the back in flight, the terror, the pain, the loss, the grief, the disgust, the shame, the guilt, the denial, the survival, the hatred and so much else that has distorted human lives down through the wounded generations across the Earths lived in spaces, everywhere, for all time, the remembered and the forgotten.

All of that vast lived experience of terror, pain, shock, disgust.

It's a lot of peoples lives totally fucked up beyond all recognition.

It's real. It is not abstract.

I allow myself to begin to imagine the terror, the feeling, the sense of going through all of that, and I am already shattered, momentarily.  This is terrifying, when I really allow it in. It is also huge - an immense sadness, grief and dismay beyond all comprehension.

I am glad that I am only imagining, that for me this is a kind of mental and emotional thought feeling experiment.

I imagine that then multiplied million upon million fold, ordinary folk caught up in the wars of the powerful, as in WWI and WWII, the wars of colonial conquest, of indigenous annihilation.

The survivors PTSD interwoven with trying to make ends meet as a  slave, an indentured worker, a beggar, a low wage worker-labourer, a shopkeeper, a cobbler, a doctor, whatever.

I think about how that trauma and poverty 'informed' or conditioned all those lives of the centuries of warfare, and in relation to my own immediate ancestors in Ireland during the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s

Traumatised parents doing their best, yet passing on the woundedness, the loss, the behavioural dynamics on unresolved trauma.

I try to see through to the ripples of effect and affect. I try to see how all of that ripples through to today, how it afflicts the present, from 100 years ago and more, millennia of war fare.

15,000 years of Civilisation  and Warfare.

And the thing is this - go back 30,000 years or 60,000 years and we see very, very little evidence of any Monumental Institutional Culture, now evidence of any Hierarchy of Violence Culture.

Kings, Palaces, Pyramids all unknown.

We know that outside the areas of 'civilisation' the vast majority of sustained cultures were egalitarian cultures built for conflict resolution, de-escalation of aggression, carrying on trade.

We know that nomadic, migratory, pastoral, horticultural, fisher-hunter-gatherers in the large part maintained healthy attachment bonding between mother and child - social cultures where nurture is highly valued, more valued than power.

War is a culture, rather than a sequence of discrete events innate to human nature.

WWI cannot be studied within it's start and finish timelines and be understood.

It was another ripple in the culture of competing militarised industrialised states - the rights and wrongs of WWI are a gaslighting exercise. The issue is the culture of warfare as a political utility, which itself emerges from hierarchy of violence culture - God the wrathful, who loves you, The Murderous State that will punish you, the dominant all powerful parent.

Ending the warfare culture is the work of all honest, free adults.

Human Welfare is our business here, not Warfare. 

There was no sacrifice, nothing was won, the bland lies of polished brass, marching to order, wreaths and ceremony are in truth a private memorial attended by  some few loyal Survivors, co-opted by the Chiefs of Staff and their political masters for political advantage.

Let me clarify.

The people who lived through the combat and destruction have a fraternal duty and a human  need to remember, to bear witness to what happened, to grieve, to cry, to stand in stoic grace and to somehow integrate their experience, and be held, lovingly.

They also need full support to deal with their wounds, they deserve help in every possible way no questions asked. They rarely receive this because to acknowledge these wounds fully would be to expose the mythos of war as a sham.

And most of all they need the civilians to ensure that the politicians never, ever send future generations to go to war off shore.

I wear both poppies,  and none.

I cannot dismiss the survivors of warfare on any side, their wounds are real, and they are victimised by those who urge warfare, by those who glorify warfare in order to condition others to habituate to warfare.

"Peace is more than the absence of War." - Arandhuti Roy

War is only possible if a culture permits child abuse.

It requires an organisational effort to prepare children for the eventuality of  war.

Indoctrination is pretty central to the successful prosecution of warfare,and enforcement of conquest, and ought be understood as a grooming behaviour that has been institutionalised, weaponized and deployed, in effect if not always on concert.

All war is child abuse, child abuse is war.

The vast resources deflected away from nurturing happy healthy families, safe communities and thus functionally sound societies deprives every child of those societies, and is a form of indirect child abuse.

The training of youngsters to become combat troops, to become something that they can have no experience of; the deliberate, methodical organised killing of warfare, and it's disorganisation in the field.

They have to break the youngster and rebuild, re-condition and in effect brain wash that youngster as part of a group going through the same abusive training that it's their togetherness that matters, so they all push through, as a habit, as an emotional reaction.

This is typically done between age 16 and 22 whilst the frontal cortex of the brain is still developing, whilst the young persons brain is still vulnerable to adverse environmental influence.

."probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms.

To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch.

But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Talking to children about Heaven and Hell is terrorism, if you can see it honestly, for what it is, without judgement, as a anti-biological cultural behaviour pattern.

To insert into the child's mind the existential fear of his or her own 'soul', or 'self' based on a fable through reward/sanction behaviour modification dynamics that internalise the external values into the child so that the child believes those values to be his or her own.

Terror, fear and Hope.

Look at it that way and then the behaviour can be addressed.

It's again the pattern of intruding into the child's psyche.

Colonialism.

"We do not need to shape our children, rather we need to respond to who they are."

The fear the child will not choose the Religion or System on their own is great, and is a reflection of the insecurity of all dogma, all doctrine, all religious zeal and practice.

Same thing, different appearance.

Healthy people do not go to war.

And so it goes..

The culture routinely, and understandably, ignores the meaning of the harms caused - we avoid the intensity and intimacy of each act of violence, each death moment is masked out.

They lost their lives is uttered rather than they were murdered for political power.

Yet each thing like that existed, and they continue to exist, and there is no balance, no resolution to that death. We cannot claw back the life that has been utterly destroyed.

Thus the historians and school masters utter numbers, statistics, miles gained or lost, and they  speak of generals, and heroes, and the villages in between are invisible - the deaths are less than notable.

Just numbers. Just numb.

And so the war habituated people will quote such information in repetition, having 'learned' the official narrative, euphemism to mask the immensity of individual suffering, repeated in unspeakable intensity, by the millions, re-presented as historical sentiment  via caricature that brings tears to the eyes, the emotions of national sacrifice so carefully tended.

That's a big ask to feel into that immense well of pain, grief, desperation, it's so much easier to take the heroic stance.

But we need to feel into that to really understand why in a fully embodied sense we must cease our states engaging in warfare.

Hence my latest release* - All War is Child Abuse.

*See and hear above!

My argument is simple.

The indoctrination that is central to the prosecution of War is child abuse.

Organised, Institutional invasive psychological grooming to exploit that child-adult for violent political activism - that's what soldiers are.

They are the tactical violent utility of the ruling class.

They wage war for political masters.

The waste of materials and wealth and human time, from extraction industries, to weapons makers, then the destruction wrought by warfare consumables 'market' - all of it is global child abuse.

I get that many millions of folk have lived experience of this in ways i do not, in ways I would never want to experience and that I am not 'expert' here...

I am looking at all the elements and I find nothing that exists that balances the harms experienced.

Nothing.

Nothing in war that I would 'endure' to serve Humanity. Nothing I would ask any other to bear to 'save' Humanity...

It's bullshit to claim there is glory, goodness, heroism, sacrifice in war - those are all after the fact rationalisations or pre-fight fantasies.

The exploitation of the hyper-adrenalenised traumatised wounded survivors trying to make sense of it all.

Nobody wins war.

As I understand it 'losses' in war are in fact the numbers of people murdered by a system of power, be they troop or civilian, adult or child, volunteer or conscript.

Murders, not losses.

Losses to the organising agencies, whose concern with numbers of troops is rather obvious.

To go after troops who murdered people in Iraq and to avoid going after the men who organised and funded and prosecuted an invasion and war against another state?

That is an appalling act of deliberate hypocrisy, because that failure to indict known War Criminals is part of what enables War Makers to get away with it. They never go to jail.

Colonialism and Conquest.

I find it  appalling that the majority of Europeans cannot 'see' what Colonialism really costed, and still costs,

How can they not understand that a cruel dynamic generated the wealth and status we Europeans now stand on, which we were born into,

I find it appalling that we British are not strong enough to arrest our White European Christian War Criminals.

Blair is free and that indicts the entire Western European polity, straight up.

Bush is free, and that indicts the entire Industrial World. Straight up.

I say this - We remember and we must prevent or it is just nostalgia and cover-up, which is very, very stinky evil.

Go on, then, televise and broadcast the old men of 'yesterdays wars' tearing up, the young men in fresh uniform, the disabled veterans, the bugle, the wind, the seriousness of the moment, the standing, lots of standing.

But if they go to war tomorrow, if we allow our Government to go to war, if we permit venal men and women to fund covert warfare, to supply active combatants in illegal Wars, in effect spreading violence, then it's just a load of political grooming gangsterism.

Just for the show.

It's not a good show.

Remember that as you go.

Remembrance.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Justice in a Nurturant Society

Justice in a Nurturant Society

Justice demands that Blair and all who were party to the planning and execution of the Iraq War be made to account before the Law for their actions.

War Crimes investigations must be immediately initiated, and they must cover the entire process and institutional behaviours associated with the push towards war.

Justice demands that Ian Duncan Smith, the DWP, and all who are party to the promotion of the false and odious 'Austerity' policy that has harmed the most vulnerable people of the UK be made to account for their actions before the Law, not least Human Rights Law in the case of the disabled and other vulnerable people in our country.

The UN case must be pursued with all vigour. Human rights must prevail  over Government policy. Individuals must be held to account, in or out of Government.

Justice demands that the wounds of both Iraqi working class and British working class are dressed, and allowed to heal, and that they receive the support, respect and gratitude they deserve for the work they do. Justice demands that working class people show solidarity locally, nationally and internationally.

We must expose and de-construct the media tactics of Government, Parties and Corporations, so that all who voted, on both sides, in the EUref recognise how we have been manipulated, spun and lied to, which was all done so that Corporations maintain their power to influence and direct Governance, and thus profit from that influence at the expense of ordinary people. A correct diagnosis must prevail, in order for a positive prognosis.

Justice demands that the lie of 'Austerity' be over turned, that employers pay fair wages to UK Citizen and Immigrant alike, so that the Tax Credit's scam as a prop to the Corporate Employers can be adjusted to meet the needs of the people as opposed to the desires of profit seeking.

Brexit must expose how immigrants have been deliberately and falsely blamed for the outcome of actions taken by Government and employers alike.

Justice demands that the Ministry for Health re-instate the legal duty of care for the health of the people, as it's primary directive.

Jeremy Hunts imposition of the Junior Doctors contract must be rejected, and who ever legislated the removal of that duty of care must be held to account - that was a constitutional change beyond the remit of Government - if anything it is a matter for a referendum. 
 

Justice demands that taxes on massive corporate and investment banking profits match those of the workers, or that they meet in the middle. A just and fair taxation system must be the core of Government funding.

The Panama Papers issue, and all that it entails, must not be allowed to vanish off the radar. What that reveals must be brought out into the open, for all tax payers to see.

Justice demands that Governance is of the people, by the people, for the people as a shared responsibility.

The Power Inquiry must be re-visited, and it's details published at the local level, in local papers and by local councils, and in all our secondary schools, so that a wider understanding of deliberative democracy is encouraged.

Justice demands that the NeoLiberal privatisation agenda be rebutted, annulled, dissuaded, dismantled where ever it has found traction, in favour of socially nurturant policies of the people's own participation and choosing.

Power must be invested in the ordinary people, the tax paying electorate.

Justice demands that all mothers be fully supported as mothers for as long as their children need, rather than be set up as part time mothers venturing into work to pay the bills of the bankers, their mortgages and maintain house price bubbles, abandoning their children to 'care' in order to 'grow the economy'. That cannot stand.

The available evidence related to early bonding, and how disruptions to the biological mandate of early bonding creates waves and waves of chronic stress that causes harm to individuals , families, communities and to Society as a whole must inform policy in this area. Parenting must be recognised as the base of a psychologically healthy society.

Justice demands that these be done, not as revenge, or punishment, rather as a recovery of common sense and empathy in all our institutions.

These are all of one piece, all connected.

There is no unemployment in this work.

There is no end to this work.

This work is life nurturing.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Referendum on 'Austerity' and the implementation of cuts to social welfare programs as they stand

I have initiated a petition to hold a referendum, to give the entire people of the UK a Ggenuinely democratic opportunity to decide for ourselves whether or not the cuts being imposed, and the rationale under which they are being presented, has any standing as a fully democratic mandate.



Petition Link :

Hold a UK wide referendum on to ask if the people of the UK accept the basis of, and implementation of 'Austerity' as it stands.

THE TEXT OF THE PETITION

"The term 'Austerity' is being used to generic label for a series of legislative actions and policy implementations that are causing avoidable harms to real people's lived experience.

From the closure of the Independent Living Fund, to privatisation of probabtion services, ideological interventions in Education, privatisation of our National Health Services, the sale of national long term National properties and resources for short term cash, the privatisation of security based public bodies, the reduction in humane public services provided by well trained, well paid professionals being replaced by for profit companies,  and much else besides, is causing socially unacceptable harms across our Society.

The rationale of these actions and policy implementations appear to be based on a misrepresentation of the situation with regard to Government use of the collective shared resource of taxation, and National Debt and an operating deficit.

The Government that is implementing these policies, taking these actions and that is actively ignoring or denying the harms being caused, does not have a majority mandate within the electorate for 'Austerity' as it is being IMPOSED on the many of the most vulnerable people within the population of the UK, and having been less than forthcoming as to any detail as to what these 'cuts' would entail in practice, whilst assuredly knowing those details, for such matters are scoped out planned many, many months in advance, have not acted in good faith, and with a large segment of society protesting on our streets, online, in conversations at home and elsewhere there is an acute need to now ask the UK's people the question posed above, and to have us, the people provide the answer.

For that is the true nature of Democracy, as the Greek people have just demonstrated. 

Now we demand that the Government become obedient to British, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Democracy, the voices of the people, possibly for the very first time, and cease to play ideological power politics with our lives and our shared contributory resources, our taxes, and our most humane aspirations.

Hold a UK wide referendum on to ask if the people of the UK accept the basis of, and implementation of 'Austerity' as it stands."
Petition link here: Petition

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

The Dalai Lama, Glastonbury, Greece and the Oligarchies - an historical over view

International politics is way, way, way dirtier than most people understand.... it's violent, it's bloody, 'my enemies enemy is my friend' is the core ethic, as alliances are formed in back room meetings with the most odious characters, and they will abuse anyone and anything in any way to get their way, and the Greater Powers devote a lot of time to manipulating the smaller powers, to intervene in national and local politics....

There is a thread of extreme violence, of murder and torture gangs operating on behalf of the British and American Governments, on the pay roll of these 'elected, democratic' Governments, stretching from the Boer war's infamous concentration camps and counter insurgency, through WWI in Russia, and onto Northern Ireland's 'b' and 'c' specials in the 20s, to the slaughter of Greek nationalists by British forces who deployed and fought alongside Nazi collaborators after the Nazi's left Greece, to Kenya and the Mau Mau 'experience' and counter insurgency, to the use of the same tactics in Vietnam, Indonesia, Equador, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Angola, Congo, and in Northern Ireland during the recent 'troubles', in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria to this day.

One the the key tools in their toolkit is the instigation and escalation of Lateral Violence, where people under an oppressive regime who feel relatively powerless to alter the situation lash out at others on their own level, in their frustration and carefully inculcated misunderdstanding of the true situation.

Lateral Violence has both a brutal physically violent aspect and a bureaucratic aspect, as the DWP well knows. The adverse behaviour of stressed frontline staff towards disabled, poor and other vulnerable groups is part of this dynamic.

The violence of the BNP/EDL is always targeted at other vulnerable groups, and never at the political power system that is creating the poverty, deprivation that the people who populate such groups are experiencing, for which they blame the immigrants, asylum seekers etc...

The executive branches are all involved in this. Up to their noses in blood. They are not bothered by the stench of death. Their denials roll off their tongues, honeyed by the Official Secrets Act... and other legal instruments that protect them.

So the Dalai Lama has to do what he does - he knows the game.

He is an international traveling salesman, and the product is 'West is good, China is bad, please Free Tibet.'

Publicly he has retired the traditional Dalai Lama position of Political leader of Tibetan people, albeit in exile..

A political position of RULE that has existed since the 5th Dalai Lama, who was as ruthless as George Bush or Genghis Khan. As political RULERS apparently have to be.

Why has he done this? What has changed?

He remains part of the spiritual hierarchy. Fair enough. He talks about a new secularism that accepts the equal validity of all religions, with a hint that Religion ought to stand away from power politics.

However he claims that the violence we see around the world is religious in nature, that it confounds the central tenets of those religions..... when he knows for sure - from direct experience of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, that the violence is always, always about political and commercial power interests competing with each other, quite unrestrained by table manners, in similar fashion to the behaviour of Jackals, Hyenas and Vultures jockeying for prime position at the remains of a corpse of a Wildebeest killed by a Lioness, with David Attenborough fawning over them.

Except that that analogy is unfair to the animals involved, for that these human beings are doing, they do to their own kind.

Intraspecies Predators. Attenborough's fawning 'interview' with Obama was one of the most revealing and disgusting pieces he has ever done. It says more about him, and his class, than the rest of his career.

International Fight Club. Whose first rule is ..... don't talk about International Fight Club. Which is why they hate (and fear) John Pilger, Noam Chomsky et al.

Future political leaders of Tibetan Buddhists may well be secular. That remains to be seen.

And all those of us who HOPE that the executive  level of international politics will change because compassionate charismatic leaders associate with them, that the compassion will rub off on them, are deluded: because unless we, the people,  also take up the confrontation of our own national executives and remove the oligarchies through democratic means, the oligarchs will remain in power. Violence is their area of expertise, and they have NEVER been removed by violence.

And so we, the people, must replace them. and that requires grass roots political organisation that is robust and dedicated to the task and absolutely honest about the situation.

That is what The Power Inquiry was all about. Grass roots political organisation without a hierarchy or executive instructing the grass roots, rather a grass roots informing and instructing itself in political solidarity, through genuinely matured participative Democracy.

And we will still have to deal with  the gangsters, the men of violence. They will not be going away anytime soon.

That's just the bog standard reality, the basic truth here.

The Dalai Lama knows this.

He knows, but does not dare say anything.

Which is WHY he was so .... 'compassionate' towards George Bush, the war criminal, at their shared birthday party.

His comments about education were probably the most radical thing he said in Glastonbury 2015.

Any educational process that strengthens the heart and the mind is probably the core essential in resistance.

In Greece, that education has been largely self education, as the youth accessed the worlds database for themselves over the past 15 years, and fully understand how the IMF fits into this picture of international Power Politics, of bullying and coercion, corruption and graft, bearing in mind that there are still many elders who lived through the British repression of Greek Nationalists after the Nazis left Greece,who saw how the British treated them and how they installed a monarchy and a capitalist elite oligarchy as the new Government. People who are a living witness to the realities of International Politics.

And they are well organised, and they understand that the men of violence must be confronted, by removing the oligarchy through democratic processes. And remember, we must be extra vigilant when it comes to Lateral Violence, which I mentioned earlier.

That same task is what is facing the people of England. It faces me every day.

I cannot avoid it if I am to take my responsibilities towards my grand children, and their children beyond them seriously. No truly mature adult can avoid this task.

Can you?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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