The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
"If there exists a medicine that we know is tool to prevent severe disease, chronic disease, economic and social harm, then it exists to be made available to every human, every person alive. That is the profit of a truly good medicine. Indeed, that is the best measure of any concept of Health Care provision,
Likewise if we knew that chronic stress can undermine efficacy of the best medicine and practice available, then we'd want to stop the chronic stressor from causing the distress.
Abolish Poverty.
Save Live.
It's not so much to ask, is it?
~ Christmess Climate Song of Hope
~
Gently, Humanely, Linking Climate Change, Shopping, Wealth Distribution, Vaccine Equity and grass-roots Humane Political Interest for a Cleaner, Nurturant Healthy future for all our Children, everywhere, where justice is the presence of equity in all spheres of life. Imagine. Then build. Love. ~
~
I really do appreciate the sharing, the kindness, the warmth of family and friendly connections, the holiday break and the genuine human sharing that Christmas represents on a person to person level.
This song is not about attacking any of that, rather it is about, for me at least, deepening the kindness, expanding the care, nurturing each other and our children's futures. It's a hymn.
I imagine a more nurturant culture. I dream of this, and I undertake small daily actions to make that dream a social and material reality. ~
A Christmess Climate Carol. ~ It's getting close to Christmas
Christ! what a mess this world is in:
where will it end, where will I begin?
The ads for gifts are everywhere,
and still the World will not share the Wealth - (or The Vaccines)
oh Christ! what a mess this world is in.
~
Our climate's changing, people die
just so we can drive smoothly by.
The lights go on, hip hip hooray!
Goodwill to all on Christmas day.
Oh Christ what a mess this world is in.
~
Where will it end, where will I begin?
It will only end when I begin.
it will only end when you begin,
it will only end when we begin
the change, the change...
~
......Imagine there's no countries -
it isn't hard to do,
nothing to kill or die for...
~
Imagine there's no poverty,
no pollution too..
~
It's getting close to Christmas,
and the best give we could give
would be the commitment
so that all could live -
living in dignity! living in dignity!
~
It will only end when I begin,
it will only end when you begin,
it will only end when we begin,
the change, the change... ~ we are all in this together ~
~ old MP3 version - listen and/or download from Reverbnation
~ What is the Carbon FootPrint of UK Luxury Shopping? ~ Even as we ordinary folk do small things to help, we need to vote in and support Governments and legislators that eschew corrupt influences from the major extractive industries and their down stream production and sale of luxury consumer goods, as a Wealth Extraction Economy, and turn instead towards design and practices similar to Cradle to Cradle, by mimicking biological principles of nothing is waste, everything can be returned to the designed, production, consumption and disposal systems, and learn how to stop generating toxic outputs and externalised costs to be supported by legislation and regulation, for all our sakes.
"It is common sense, you you put it like that, yes." ~
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.
Cycles of this English Epidemic, this Global Pandemic
Avoidable harms deliberately not avoided.
~ March 17 2021 - Mike Ryan at WHO ~
~
1. Callous reckless behaviour. From a teacher, who is probably exhausted, at the end of a tether of chronic stress, and who had Covid, tested positive, and was aware he or she was bringing it into the school. A teacher has a duty of care to the health of those in his or her care, above and beyond any other duty. Teaching is the lessor responsibility in this situation. A teacher should be evidence led in this regard.
"So, my 12 year old's maths teacher decided to come into work and teach maths today, despite having tested positive for Covid, "because I'm vaccinated". Fuming."
"My son's Headteacher has just sent a letter saying we must "build up our #Immunity by having the children in school during an outbreak to become infected with #Covid19.
I thought that the #herdimmunity theory was debunked? 9 of 30 are testing positive."
And here's why - Government Policy is to infect 8 million children to confer 'enhanced immunity' onto the adult vaccinated populations - using the children as 'immune boosters'. For profit.
3. New Statesman report on this policy with utterly shocking citations from Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
"How The UK Sleepwalked into another Covid Disaster."
This was not sleep walking. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Government was fully awake, JCVI was fully awake, but definitely not 'woke'.
They chose deliberately to expose millions of people children, parents, relatives and others to the virus.
4. An article from this time last year examining the English Government approach to Covid, from a perspective of The Right to Health of the population.
"Experience in the UK also shows the need for a clear national strategy from the outset, as soon as a risk is reasonably identified through scientific evidence. Political action must be prompt, based on scientific evidence, transparent, and communicated clearly to the population. A soft approach like the one adopted by the UK in the weeks preceding the lockdown, where private actors with economic power remained in charge of deciding whether people should travel to work and whether events would be maintained, should be avoided."
5. There are no words to adequately describe this callous, reckless, misinformed and frankly lethal policy.
More than 1000 people a week are dying awful, horrific deaths.
11% of school children have been infected.
We're averaging around 80-100k child cases a week.
Around 250 hospital admissions of children every week.
Close to 3000 children with Long Covid every week.
And between 3-7 child covid deaths a week
NHS is close to a critical state, with 1/3rd of ICU capacity occupied with COVID.
6. This makes the corruption story look like walk in the park.
7. The long term health implications of this virus are unknown, but there are solid indicators of serious sequelae that could last for the life of those infected. An interview with a respected immunologist, Immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi, outlining some of the risks he sees now and foresees into the future, with so much unknown.
"BM: You recently wrote a letter to California school boards which was very powerful. You raised some very important issues. What are your concerns about COVID infections in children?
AL: Well, it does really worry me. We are just assuming that infection won’t have long-term consequences in people, and especially in children. And there’s almost a systematic exposure of people and children to the virus before they’re vaccinated. I know from what I’ve read in the studies that have come out that some people are going to definitely be genetically susceptible to very bad outcomes and death. And I think it’s not right for kids to be just exposed to this without a fighting chance, without vaccination.
It’s very disturbing when I think that we’re running the risk for everybody to get something like any Lewy body disease or neurodegeneration and we’re systematically exposing generations to this. I was trying to help. My hope is that we take it seriously and we give people protection. If these children have genetic susceptibility or health concerns, or if their family has health concerns, they’re given remote options. I was thinking if I were in their position, would I want to be consigned to definite exposure to SARS-CoV-2? No, I wouldn’t! And I would want to be protected, with acknowledging that the virus is airborne. So, better ventilation in classrooms, mask wearing and vaccination of children.
There’s a terrible assumption that kids are okay with SARS-CoV-2 infection when there’s data coming out that they have lost out on a greater number of healthy years than adults. Kids have better immunological response to vaccination than adults as well. And kids are more likely to be infected than adults and kids are more likely to be reinfected than adults.
We’re messing up! We’re doing this completely wrong only because probably, my assumption is, kids have less agency. Kids don’t have the agency adults do. That’s fine that they are not like grandma or grandpa when it comes to being infected, it isn’t as dangerous. But it’s unjust to not protect them and vaccinate them. Infection in children should not be written off.
A lot of people are saying it’s endemic and everyone is going to get it. So, they relinquish responsibility of controlling its spread and making these areas safe and just consigning kids to definite inflammation and infection where they’re less likely to make immune-competent memory."
8. In May 2020, after the Cummings Road Show, I wrote a a blog piece suggesting we needed to take drastic action to prevent further harm to the population. I suggested arresting Johnson, Cummings, Whitty, Valance and the entire Cabinet, removing them from office, placing them on remand and instituting a national unity government with a directive to manage the epidemic using elimination/suppression of the virus strategy, which was proven to work much, much better than 'herd immunity' aka 'living with the virus'.
I argued the case for Malfeasance and I, and many others even in those early days predicted a series of waves of infection, fatality, chronic disease and economic hardship, into the future, with no end in sight. Given the way the virus generates variations through travelling through a population, meeting new evolutionary pressures and beating them, that was an obvious call.
That was when deaths were at about 25,000 people and long Covid was showing it's first signs of being a real and last impact.
9. My argument stands. Everything we are learning about this Government, the news media and various misinformed lobby groups reveals a callous, reckless and utterly inhumane attitude, an avarice so deep and so corrosive that it places the entire population a risk, a risk that can be avoided, for what?
For Corporate profits, that's what.
10. Earlier in April 2020 I detected a pattern that has historical roots, notably the attitude and actions of the British Government in relation to the Irish and Bengali Famines of the mid 1800s. Late Victorian Holocausts.
11. Today we are living a late Elizabethan Holocaust. I wrote this in March 2021, as the winter 20/21 surge was underway, and showing signs of abating, as the nation was in lockdown.
12. Was it Her Majesty's back or was it her awareness of the holocaust underway and a desire to not stand with Johnson as the nation commemorates the grief, horror and immense human tragedy of WWI? Who knows? I don't. But, if I was in her position, I would not stand besides Johnson or give him my stature to lean upon.
13. It has to be said that Labour, under Starmer, has not been the advocate for elimination strategy that the English people so badly needed and deserved from an 'Opposition'. The whole of Parliament bears responsibility in all of this. 'No ifs, no buts'.
He fired Rebecca Long-Bailey and abandoned the National Education Union at a critical time, in mid 2020. He excluded Corbyn from the Parliamentary Party. He is not in position for the people of this nation. Marcus Rashford did some of the work he neglected to do.
14. I am at a loss for more words. The trauma visited upon the English people is too great.
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.
Corruption - exploiting ones position of power and others vulnerabilities for ideological and personal gain, causing harm to society and eviscerating healthy governance.
~
Storage of millions of useless face masks, and other PPE: the Uniserve Contract
The Good Law Project has helped to uncover the current tide of corrupt crony capitalism by taking this Government to court to reveal the details that have been deliberately obscured by this government.
One example of the many series of dodgy contracts for useless PPE kit was with Uniserve, a British Logistics Company, with no previous experience in health care, based in Kent. Uniserve rushed out in early 2020 to contract for PPE from China, PPE that turned out to be inadequate - it could not be used.
By late summer, the volume of useless PPE that Uniserve was importing started to cause problems. Warehouses were full and shipping containers stacked up at Felixstowe, blocking our largest port.
James Kemball, a logistics company owned by Uniserve, got the job of relocating the PPE. 15,000 shipping containers were moved. That is 15,000 truck trips. As a topical aside, what's the carbon foot print of that inept exercise?
Paying for the same 'mistake' many times.
The government is now paying James Kemball for those 15,000 containers to be stored on at least two plots, covering 10 acres, at Port of Ipswich. Thousands of containers are also sitting at Port of Tilbury, a field in Mendlesham and on a strip of rented land opposite Melton railway station.
The proceeds of a corrupt contract scattered across the land, to flow into private profits. Money that could be better deployed funding HEPA filters in schools for example, as part of better management of the epidemic. What a double waste.
How many children will be exposed to SARSCOV2 in unsafe schools? How many will die, how many will go through long covid, how many will be traumatised by the confusion, by the possibility that they spread the virus to a friend, a relative or any other who became seriously ill? There is a link between these harms and those dodgy contracts.
We have an elected dictatorial Government, secure in an 80 seat majority, in the House of Commons, awarding dodgy contracts for useless kit to friendly associates, a government that cruelly withdrew £20 a week Covid uplift' from Universal Credit recipients for no good reason, even as the epidemic continues apace, with circa 1000 deaths from Covid every week, a government that is now paying a subsidiary of the dodgy contracted party Uniserve to store the useless PPE kit, a government that is basically funnelling public cash into private coffers, for doing nothing much beyond being a friend of the relevant Government ministers, or a party donor.
Waste and tragically, in the context of the Covid Epidemic in the UK, part of the guarantee of more spread of the virus. Layers of harm.
The damage to our democracy, to our people, to our nations health and safety - is the profit gouged by this behaviour really worth it?
Private Eye's special report, in the form of a podcast 'Profits of Doom', and also reported in issue 1560, suggests that for those on the take, and on the make, it certainly is.
"Richard Brooks and Solomon Hughes cover both ends of the Covid wealth gap - from the companies making mega-millions out of lazy procurement processes all the way to the workers having their wages levelled down rather than up. Free major government contract with every download!"
We all know, of course, that for those who have died, who have contracted Long Covid, those whose businesses have collapsed due to mismanagement of the epidemic on these islands, their families and for the low wage working population in general, the costs are not worth it.
The Tip of The Corruption Iceberg.
Another Angry Voice published a short list of crony capitalist 'entrepreneurial' activity: their article lists a long list of this corruption,
"Here's just a fraction of it:
🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his corporate paymasters like Randox within government. Randox got £480 million in Covid contracts, but they horribly botched a load of test results by sending the all clear to tens of thousands of people who were actually infected.
🔵 Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through extraordinary legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free.
🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the six figure salary paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri for "IT lessons" without any declaration of their relationship as one of his registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique that was funded by a Tory Party donor; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa of Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election.
🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated an average of £3 million each to the Tory operation!
🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord and his sister even got lucrative contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests!
🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts.
🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds.
🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin.
🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway.
🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco was lavished with at least £200 million worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is former Tory MP and grandson of Winston Churchill Nicholas Soames.
🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he "forgot" to declare as an interest in the report).
🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses) through the practice of second-jobbing, and perhaps the most egregious is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties.
The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life all combined!
🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".
🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned.
🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton failed to declare a load of secret offshore investments. He was the Tory party's PPE Tsar who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts detailed above!
🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing in parliament against closing tax loopholes!
🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat and claiming £1,900 a month in rent!
🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, £350 million of which was provided directly to Greensill subsidiaries and business interests. Then Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later!
🔵 Multiple MPs from both sides of parliament have been taking £thousands worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament. The worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest.
And this lot is just one part of the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!"
Johnson Lied, people died.
Johnson used the COP26 platform to declare that 'the UK is not remotely a corrupt country'.
His careful use of the phrase 'the country' was a deliberate evasion. His choice of wording was designed to enrage people who support his Government and annoy everyone who has a deep loyalty and affection for The Country. A lot of people would of course take exception to the accusation that the country is corrupt as a whole. And they'd be correct.
A classic gaslighting ploy. A deliberate deflection.
The issue is not that the country is corrupt.
The issue is that many members of the Conservative Party in Government (and beyond) are engaged in blatantly corrupt behaviour. Johnson also suggested that there are rules governing MPs lobbying and consultancy work, and that those found to have 'broken the rules' must be held accountable.
Here's an idea.
Make all those MPs and their associates who have extracted such great wealth from the public purse hand back every penny they have 'made' to their local constituencies councils, bar them from political and Government positions and bar them from directorships of companies for life.
Make the companies that 'donated' or 'employed' these MPs match their payments of their 'consultancy fees' and 'salaries' to each MPs local council social care services, and bar them from political lobbying for ever.
Back in February 2010, before the election which made him the Prime Minister Cameron had this to say:
"We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism.
"So we must be the party that sorts all this out. Today it is a £2bn industry that has a huge presence in parliament. The Hansard Society has estimated that some MPs are approached over 100 times a week by lobbyists.
"I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works."
International Trade Secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan on Sky News, 8th November 2021 cited in Private Eye, issue 1560, November 2021.
"I don't think we should have a removal of the ability to maintain or have a second job, because it brings a richness to our role as members of Parliament."
Parliament should make 'the rule's going forward much more robust, including making this kind of corruption a criminal offence, with custodial sentences mandated for for such behaviour.
There's no need to apply such harsh obligations in retrospect. The return of all these corrupt profits would suffice for now.
My Little Crony
There's a rather superb website, a clever resource that is tracking the links and webs of crony capitalists operating within this English Government
My Little Crony : take a while to play with it, and study it. The Good Law Project is also unearthing much of this information and Bylinetimes, Double Down News and a few others are reporting it for the public's awareness. Most news media are avoiding the matter.
What will future historians write of the failures of this Parliament and the British Corporate Media to hold this government to account? What will they say about the population that let that happen?
Corruption, legal or otherwise is an affront to democracy.
For any politician to take money from a business, or any other sponsor, and then attempt to influence legislation or contracts for that business or sponsor is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Crony Capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic and obviously corrupt, and more importantly, in the middle of a health crisis it undermines public services at every turn because attention to the detail required to maintain best possible delivery of those services is diverted to maintaining illicit cashflow into private hands, to covering it up, to gaslighting the public in order to avoid accountability. This is beyond criminal, it is institutionalised psychopathy.
~
NEW SONG - Cash For Questions
Chorus :
Cash for questions, cash for influence,
cash for peerages, personal gain!
Verses:
The second job is bringing in the loot,
sneaky, underhand, disguising the truth
use your position to rig the game,
influence and effluent, pour it down the drain!
Elected on a premise, to improve society
duty of care, probity and honesty,
legislators should not skate on thin ice
their responsibility is to never lie.
When crony capitalists rake in the cash
when their 'services' fail and crash
like Dido Harding, Randox and Patterson
PPE in storage, we can see the pattern.
And people get hurt, and people die,
so much harm, and we all know why
it's a rigged game, voters always lose
it's a rigged game, the honest ones must now choose
let's break it down, bring them down
corruption, bullying, it's all evil.
let's break it down, send them down
corruption, bullying, it's all evil.
~
~
Here's the thing I see : it is that Crony Capitalism, Cash for Questions, Cash for Peerages, Corporate Donations to MPs to influence legislation and policy, Corporate and Ideological Think Tanks funded by Oligarchs (Tax Payers Alliance for example) and Corporate Lobbyism undermines democracy, it demeans the vote, it dismisses the electorate and it is reckless abandonment of duty of care by all involved.
Not every MP, not even a majority of MPs are involved. Yet those who do not stoop so low seem loathe to root this adverse behaviour out. They bleat about the erosion of public trust in parliament, but do nothing meaningful that would prevent this abuse of power, let alone punish it.
This behavioural dynamic - the corruption of a few and the feeble response of the many - denies the democratic mandate of the electorate. It undermines justice. It pollutes everything it touches. It imposes immense costs on the population, the tax paying working class, in terms of resources diverted from serving our genuine needs.
This behaviour causes great harm.
That said, the practice is as old as Magna Carta itself, which was a medieval attempt to institutionalise the power of the robber barons, who controlled trade and thus generated the wealth of the State the monarchy absorbed. Magna Carta was an early version of Corporate Lobbying assuming dominance of the body politic, rather than an effort to assert Freedom for citizens, as it has so often been misread and misrepresented as.
So it goes within all violence hierarchies. If my readers do not recognise the violence of this hierarchy, I suggest assessing the non-avoidance of fatalities and chronic disease as an act of institutional violence. A Plague enhancing Government. Medieval in attitude, scope and effect.
21st Century
This 21st Century is calling for genuine democratic regulation of everything this culture does that causes harm. Externalised Costs is the umbrella term for much of this.
This call for democratic and legislative regulation of harmful practice is necessary in order to prevent the harms being caused by the way the industrial system is operating. That would be a healthy movement. The only way through this, safely, must start with ruthless honesty, accountability and for those who are causing deliberate harm, sanctions.
I am merely a grass roots singer, and old man, poor and toothless. Justice can only be done by a united grass roots. The best I can do is sing it like I see it in the hope that having a laugh at it all somehow helps to blow the veil off, clears the air a bit and helps build the bridges of solidarity we so desperately need.
Here are some of my topical Covid Era Songs of Corruption, reckless arrogance, negligent harm causation and avarice.
1. 64 Ways to Mislead a Country (50 ways to leave your lover)
Deliberately down grading existing NHS Test & Trace, rather than expanding it from a good knowledge and experience baseline, to divert vast funding to private coffers, whilst enabling more spread of a dangerous virus. Herd Immunity.
Catalogue of harm caused by English Conservative Government 2020/21 in relation to mismanagement of the epidemic on these islands.
5. Cash For Questions
Youtube version.
Abuse relationship.
In my view there is an Abuse Relationship, with the English Ruling class in the dominant abuser position, unwilling to cease it's abusive behaviour even as it can see the harms it is causing, and the working class population at large exposed to those harms.
corruption: The Great Great Game
-
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.
The Industrial System is inherently adversarial: it treats those who are harmed by the Industrial System, those who bring attention to the harm, in order to stop the harm, as adversaries.
Another way to put it is like this: political power struggles undermine healthy governance - adversarial dynamics inhibit co-operative dynamics. Any relationship that has a power struggle within it is toxic.
Industrial political Power is inherently adversarial in that it is profitable only because its foundation for wealth extraction is created by externalising costs.
Those who bear the pain of the costs and bring attention to that pain, and those costs, are considered as adversaries.
When those who are harmed find a voice and become advocates to confront the harm causation, with an eye to stopping the harms, the industrial cult treats them as enemies to be crushed.
This is a reactionary stance - the cult wishes to preserve the extraction of wealth above all else, and will attack anyone who questions the morality or wisdom of extracting wealth at such a cost.
It will co-opt anyone who proposes solutions in order to deflect real change.
The Industrial system is also adversarial and manipulative in that it imposes poverty in order to make low wage work seem more attractive, in order to maximise profit taking.
Low wages has nothing to do with skill level - it is a devaluation of human time in favour of institutionalised profit taking.
Every hour of every persons life has equal life value.
Slavery is about the economics of wealth extraction - maximum profit efficiency - in the first place, In the British and European colonies Racism was invented in order to justify slavery, after the fact.
Politics is the struggle for power - healthy governance is all about co-operation and de-escalation of emergent conflicts. These two are in eternal conflict with each other. The resistance of those who seek to dominate is what maintains the need to struggle for healthy governance.
If that resistance was dropped, the power struggle would cease, and healthy governance would prevail.
This is the central problem of climate change, air pollution, poverty as an economic lever, war as a tool of policy - the resistance to healthy governance is the problem we need to address, collectively.
We desperately need healthy governance, and to attain that, as electorates, as voters and as citizens we need to reject these struggles for power and dominance because these struggles are wasting precious time, (time we will not be able to reclaim) when it comes to dealing with the impacts of climate changing environmental damaging polluting behaviour.
What climate change and the SARSCOV2 virus tells us is that we are in this together.
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.
The show is not over, yet the show is over already.
~
All the political parties are failing us. The System is failing us all. The religions are all failing us. The industrial militarised 'economic' system of competing powers extracting wealth is failing us. The adults are failing the children. COP26 is already failing us. It is blatantly not a fair COP.
We need a movement to advocate for evidence led policy that seeks to avoid avoidable harms at every level, from abolishing poverty to the cessation of war fare, from reducing use of fossil fuels to eliminating corruption in Government, from promoting RegenAg and Cradle to Cradle production, use and consumption to withdrawing from all undeveloped lands and their peoples, in order to meet the climate challenge. Put it like this - Poverty is avoidable, an erupting volcano is not. Invading indigenous lands to 'develop sustainably' is avoidable, and if it is not avoided the destruction of the indigenous culture is likewise not avoidable. What culture has the right to destroy those cultures who in a myriad of forms have lived sustainably in those lands for centuries?
~
COP26 is dead! Long Live Cop27?
Simple
What we need is simple. Stop causing harm. Is that so much to ask?
Simply put we need to stop harming our shared environment, we need to stop harming the bio-diversity of living creatures with whom we share this environment, and we need to stop harming each other. Stop causing avoidable harms, at the level of Government and Corporation, at the very least. Simple.
I am not calling for utopic behaviour. Stop causing so much harm. Is that so much to ask?
The task is complex, but competing power agendas are making it all much, much more complicated than it needs to be.
Complex
The task is complex because it demands we meet a variety of primary needs that are not being met, and it demands we find ways to balance 'competing needs'.
For example abolishing poverty is a necessity because it is an affliction that undermines every society where it is allowed to persist. Poverty harms the entire society where it exists. Poverty is being deliberately maintained.
Abolishing poverty will dig into the wealth extraction process of the leading oligarchies, because they depend on low wages for efficiency of wealth extraction.
However, when we abolish poverty, it will reduce rather than remove their profit take. The corporations and small businesses can still make profits, without imposing poverty. Win-win.
They do not need such immense profits, they can do with less.
Deforestation is low paid work, often carried out by people close to destitution, as an act of desperation, a last resort. If those people were not so impoverished, would they bother to sweat in a forest, destroying it, risking disease and nasty accidents, just so that others can make immense profits?
How do we balance the needs of people, as workers and as communities with the needs of Corporations and Shareholders for a decent return on their investments of time, energy and money?
Balancing those needs requires effort, attention to detail, it demands empathy, humane concern and technical focus to change those methods that are causing harm so that they no longer do so. This is complex, it is not complicated.
Complicated.
All of the above is made much more complicated than it needs to be because the power plays of Extracted Accumulated Wealth as a political, economic and cultural master, which I consider is a psychological illness, presenting as an hegemonic attitude, is impeding progress on every level, from refusing to abolish poverty to undermining democracy, from engaging in warfare to Billionaires and Corporations buying political representation that disfavours the electorate - none of this activity is helping.
This hegemonic dynamic is a fabric woven with the ideological threads of 'let's conquer the world' to attain market dominance, similar in method and action as Old Empires.
Am I repeating myself?
The abhorrent US/UK Military 'Full Spectrum Dominance' dynamic, the behaviour of Facebook, Amazon, Google -The Surveillance Capitalists - and the intransigence of the fossil fuel industry and others seeking dominant 'market share' nationally and globally is a dynamic order that continues to refuse to address the harms they are causing, in order to continue to expand and dominate their respective domains. They also wish to avoid paying their externalised costs.
Harms are not being honestly addressed. More power is sought.
Who pays the price?
Again we can see that the same pattern of maintaining position and seeking profits is happening during this pandemic (rather than asserting unity in the purpose of protecting the global population), where wealthy global North countries are blatantly not sharing wealth and technical ability be it fair taxation or the rights to manufacture and deliver vaccines and other vital logistical elements of suppressing the virus, or resources to deploy dealing with climate change in order to protect populations exposed to risk of avoidable harm. The UN called for a cessation of warfare in early 2020. The leading powers rejected that call.
If harm is avoidable, why not make that effort?
The tobacco smoker is addicted, and we recognise that addicts need and deserve help to break the addition, to prevent greater harm at a later date. But the big business of that addiction, and it's tax take for Governments stand as enablers of the tobacco addiction. Fossil fuel industry learned the tricks of denial from the tobacco industry.
It is the addiction to Power that is the problem that drives so many other problems. Johnson et all demonstrate that every day they sit in high office.
"The Science has been crystal clear, How dare you continue to look away, and come here and say you are doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and you understand the urgency, and no matter how sad and angry I am I do not want to believe that. Because if you understand the situation and you kept on failing to act then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe." Greta Thunberg in 2019
The Telegraph hosts this video excerpt, and it's telling that they chose this frame of Greta Thunberg as the thumbnail. They had to acknowledge her statement, yet they also needed to disparage her image, her person, wordlessly.
Making the choice to allow or enable an avoidable harm to any one who has less power, in order to maintain and enhance that power differential is evil. It is very much a matter of human behaviour, rather than some external force of 'evil', Choosing to exploiting another's vulnerability in order to gain more advantage is evil.
We are all vulnerable, and if anything the SARSCOV2 Virus is telling us it is this - "You are all in this together."
What is it that links COP26, COVID, Warfare, Poverty and many other issues where healthy governance is most urgently needed, (governance that acts in a timely manner to avoid avoidable harms)?
What is the impediment to appropriate action required to avoid avoidable harms?
The Underlying Problem.
The extraction of wealth, wealth which is then accumulated and deployed as political influence, to preserve the systems of wealth extraction that further enables the extractors in the exercise of the power to influence and corrupt democratic legislatures. A vicious cycle, indeed. Venal. Economic groundhog day.
That cultural vehicle is being driven by the Wealth Extraction Party; it is a vehicle that pollutes as it rolls, because it's much more 'efficient' in generating wealth for power than it is at preventing pollution, and that cheapskate approach enhances more efficient wealth extraction.
Who pays the price?
The masters of wealth are clearly willing to let others - the working class, the impoverished poor, the destitute - to pay the price of their wilful negligence, so that they can continue to extract wealth from the environment and the population and maintain their power to do so, against all reform.
The passengers - us ordinary citizens - are urged to play at recycling, to limit our consumption behaviours, and we are often scapegoated. We are more or less rendered impotent to make meaningful changes in the direction and speed of the cultural vehicle, and we are told to put on their safety belts and stay quiet and not distract the driver.
The 'will of the people' aka the passengers ability to choose a safer destination is not being given due attention or support.
Wealth, Government and Democracy Undermined.
Wealth Extraction dominates the thinking of Governments where the Wealth Extraction Party prevails - their primary objective is how to maintain wealth extraction through the various crises that wealth extraction generates.
Yesterdays session, on the matter of Owen Patterson's 30 day suspension, in the House of Commons proves the point.
#COP26 is not much different than COP1, 10 or 20 in this regard. In spite of lots of genuinely decent, serious and well informed people working on these problems, globally, COP26 delivers promises and inadequate action amid much talk about private finance chucking $150 trillion at the problem, with an eye towards the profits to be made from the proposed 'green revolution' above all else.
For me, the profit we need is a cleaner environment,a population protected from harm caused by climate change, war fare, SARSCOV2 and imposed poverty.
That is a profit that has deep human value.
How can we as ordinary people get the driver to change course?
1. Refuse to vote for or support any politician who backs Wealth Extraction over public and societal health, the health of the people and our shared environment - feasible. Recall them all!
2. Vote instead for politicians informed and advised by grounded evidence led science and applicable practice who will preserve public health, cease the harm causation by helping to develop and enable practices that do not cause such damage. - feasible.
3. Giving the people well paid work to prevent further harms, to carry out the repair of and clean up of our shared environment would be really useful. Oddly enough, if we have enough resources to live well, and are happier, then we have less 'need' or desire to engage in comfort shopping and more desire to do work that helps the whole community.
Universal basic income is one way to support that shift. Why not pay 8 billion people to do the work of 'going green'?
4. Reduce private car use in cities by funding green public transit systems, taxing fossil fuel cars in cities - the drivers must understand they are driving on externalised costs, and they must pay, now - make more work local and promote working from home, provide goods that can be proven to not cause harm, reduce eating meat, stabilise property values and rents - these are not immediately feasible until we find ways to abolish baseline and real value poverty.
The poor and low paid worker depend upon public transit, the wealthy use private transit. Private transit clogs the roads, making public transit less efficient. The poor suffer the most spread of this virus, the wealthy have better health outcomes.
Abolishing poverty is a core component of how we move from harm to nurture as human culture.
5. Change to low electricity use light bulbs, use less plastic, use cloth shopping bags, conserve water by flushing the loo less frequently and thousands of other small measure - all these are reduced to symbolic gestures as long as the Wealth Extraction business and it's externalised costs are allowed to prevail.
When the PR of the Neoliberal Ideologues claim the buyer determines the market, that if we reject a product it will not be made, they are gaslighting. It is not true. The shopper does not control the market.
Legislate and Regulate.
Civilisation depends on the constraints imposed by legislatures to protect the vulnerable, to define and assert standards, to frustrate criminals and to wage peace, honestly. Government could be fine utility in the right hands.
I think that what we need to do is to regulate industry and wealth extraction, and to do that we need to remove their ability to influence and corrupt Government.
This can be done.
It requires an immense rebalancing of power: the power to act as an informed, evidence led collective, entire populations working for each other's best interests must take priority over the competing powers dynamic working to achieve hegemonic status.
Competition to become dominant is war fare. Competing to improve outcomes for each other is another level of civilised humanity, and it is where we must go.
We need to use the resources to hand
a) - the creation of currency - to abolish poverty, impoverished peoples cannot work to address the issues we face. We need to redeploy our working in order to repair and protect the environment -
b) the democratic legislatures - we need the power of Government to legislate to regulate industry to shift gear and drive towards systems of raw materials extraction, production and consumption that prevent externalised costs from being generated, so that they generate nutrient cycles that nurture environment and people alike.
This can be done. It is not impossible.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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"Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, has already announced plans to cut benefits to encourage more people into the job market, saying that this was part of the government’s plan to “make work pay” by not allowing people to rely solely on welfare as their main form of income."
This is the strategic stance of the English Ruling Elite, the Aristocracy, the Land owners and the Corporate Bosses and their Shareholders.
Their strategy is to remove state provided social and economic support in order to drive people into low paid work. This planning involves privatisation of NHS, Education and Social Care, keeping wages low and undermining democratic regulation of Industry and shared commons monopolies.
All excuses will be made, in spite of evidence of harm. Removing these three elements on their own is creating poverty in order to extract more wealth from workers. Socialism is to be destroyed as an 'enemy'.
The most brief analysis of socialism is that it is designed to abolish poverty by regulating the power of the Oligarchy using the means of the Legislature.
In practice it is 'Nudge' (introduced by Cameron, previewed by The Work Capability Assessment). Or, more harshly, withdrawing social support to herd poor people into a situation designed entirely to maximise Wealth Extraction aka shareholder returns, irrespective of the harms it will cause, (raw sewage from Chicken Factories destroying entire river systems, polluting our shores), all the while well aware of those harms. It is brutal and purely for the purpose of Wealth Extraction. Psychopathy runs through the corridors of power in England. Lies, gaslighting, bullying, hate campaigns and grift.
In this blog I am examining a 1982 Cabinet long-term policy discussion paper, because it indicates a 40 year political operation, in incremental steps, to privatise social programs, from NHS to Education, Water to Energy and much else besides.
It also gives an insight into the thinking and the sense of entitlement to Rule within the English Ruling Class and illustrates how they view ordinary people as people who can be manipulated by how the Government sets the circumstances within which we live. Nudge has evolved to pushing people over an economic and social cliff.
Looking at attitudes towards poverty, I found this article from 2016, "Is poverty in the UK in 2016 caused by employment, habit or circumstance?" prepared by the New Policy Institute, which explores those attitudes as they stood in 2016. It draws on some details of a survey of poverty carried outlined in a Survey of Poverty in East London : Labour and Life of the People Charles Booth (1889) Source
"The day after we published Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2016, Indy Bhullar, curator for Economics and Social Policy at LSE library, shared this fascinating excerpt from Charles Booth’s famous survey of the East London poor, first published in 1889. He shared it because the percentage of ‘very poor’ households categorised as being in ‘great poverty’ by Booth due to having insecure, irregular and poorly paid work was the exact same proportion of people in poverty in the UK in a working family in 2016: 55 per cent"
"Booth’s belief that some poverty is attributable to laziness (‘idleness’) or immoral habits (‘drunkenness’ and ‘thriftlessness’) also resonates very clearly today. The circumstance of being in poverty (especially if you receive any working-age social security benefits) is taken as a sign by much of the media, political establishment and the general public to be a sign that you are feckless and lazy. Problems relating to addiction, from substance misuse to smoking are still viewed by many as ‘bad habits’, as arecent proposal from a CCG in Yorkshireto limit surgeries for smokers highlights.
While Booth referred to illness, disability and family composition as ‘circumstances’, many of the policies of the last five years- from the increased scrutiny of people receiving disability benefits to the limit that only two children per family will be eligible for support through Universal Credit and Tax Credits from next year- show that what Booth termed ‘circumstance’ are increasingly seen as bad ‘habits’ which must be quashed.
There are fundamental problems with attempting to draw a line between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. We need to ask ourselves what price, both financially and ethically, we are willing to pay as a society in the service of this paternalistic view of the poor. In 2015/16, 93 per cent of JSA sanctions that were reviewed were overturned- this is just one of the many indications that mechanisms within our current system for separating the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ are applied in contradictory and inconsistent ways. Is it worth significant public money being spent on gatekeeping to ensure no one with ‘bad habits’ is benefitting from our public safety net? Is the possibility that someone ‘undeserving’ may get support from our social security system really worth other people who are disabled, raising a young child alone, or unable to find work suffering?"
The fundamental question is this - is the suffering of so many people a harm that can be avoided, and if it is not being avoided who deems that harm worth it, and why?
~
Pdf file of the 1982 Cabinet Report : 30 pages, carefully typed out, photographed. Take a look. It's informative. Instructive even. More about that later. Kew Archive Location CAB 184/628 (Available to view at Kew, not available online) ~ A Guardian report on the release of the Cabinet Discussion Paper, in 2012, under the 30 years rule. The Guardian were careful to not give it the attention it required, to evade the dark arrogance of the intent this document revealed, given that the plans discussed were being implemented by both Conservatives and Labour, albeit at different paces, the Cons being more openly hostile and wilfully cruel. ~ W.E Du Bois is much respected as an influential writer and thinker, of some wisdom. These are his words. ~
“We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can [and] do read worthwhile books.”
W. E. B. Du Bois - 1868 - 1963
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“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” ― Aneurin Bevan
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Topical Images indicating Westminster Ruling Class policy influencers:
Map of raw Sewage Release permits voted for recently by Conservative and Unionist Party MPs; Effluence People reacted with anger when the Tory party voted to allow raw sewage release in to rivers and onto coastline. They may yet turn the tide. #Turdreich
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The point being made in 1982 at the Cabinet Office level: Influence Poverty levels of State assistance and the social deprivation that acknowledged as directly linked to petty crime, ill-health, bad nutrition and much else besides as a causation. ~
Cheering the passage of a 2015 Budget that maintained poverty levels of low wages, and sub-poverty levels of State Assistance to unemployed, disabled and other vulnerable citizens.
Nonsense "Universal Basic Income would disincentives worker to take up jobs, and anyway, Universal Credit, the system I created, would be much better suited". Iain Duncan Smith
Consequences (DWP staff admit psychological abuse of claimants, able, disabled and vulnerable) UN Report - 120,000 excess deaths 2010 - 2019 largely among vulnerable Universal Credit claimants. Poverty is a chronic stressor, and it has a huge health impacts on it's own, eg recent report on adverse birth outcomes, how poverty affects children's health, is a major factor, for millions of people in the UK. 5th Richest Country in the world, they tell us. We see very little comfort in that thought, the way things are.
'let's get you into work, then shall we? It's for your own good, you know.' This attitude emerges from both Conservative and Labour Parties (apart from people such as Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbot, Richard Burgon, Zara Sultana et al.) aligned with the establishment Civil Service Aristocrats, people like old Robert Armstrong. The establishment are behind the scenes. Class system prevails.
~
Affluence - what does a multi-millionaire understand about living in poverty?
2021 - By removing the £20 uplift, poverty will increase among the 6 million claimants of Universal Credit. 40 percent of these claimants – over two million people - are in work
Quite a lot as it happens, and he just doesn't care much. That is the problem. That lack of concern for the welfare of ordinary people, the low aged and the poor.
There's a pandemic underway and Government demands that we keep on shopping and clubbing. Keep on working for the economy. The false dichotomy of a conflict between the people's health and the Economy is driven by the desire to extract wealth and enhance power. The people's health is quite clearly not a priority when we are seeing close to 100,000 cases of infection daily.
There's a lot of PR involved in all of this. Selling the product, (it's like flu, it doesn't affect children, they would have died anyway) making the sale determines elections more than does policy well explained and thus accurately understood by the electorate.
Marketing
The world of marketing is predicated on the ability to manipulate people's emotion and perception in order to make a sale.
Consumers can be manipulated by availability, price, presentation, bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by restrictions. (price increase, scarcity).
A population of consumers can be manipulated by availability, price, presentation and bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by 'restrictions', (price increase, scarcity).
Workers can be manipulated into accepting just above poverty wages by lowered levels of social support programs, privatised health care and education, and much else besides, availability, price, presentation and bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by 'restrictions', (price increase, scarcity). Nudge has been around for a long time indeed!
Is this a key understanding of why Power invested in the Ruling Class entitlement likes consumerism so much? Because consumer social behaviour can be more readily 'nudged'? And if you can change behaviour there, without the targets noticing it, then you can change behaviour anywhere. Without the targets understanding what is being done to them.
The Story of Stuff : Consumerism's origins
Consumerism is undermining our environment, our social systems : bookmark this 20 minute video, because it speaks eloquently and accurately of when consumer culture was birthed, and why. And who benefits the most.
Keep buying our stuff!
Do the Ruling Class understand the individualism of the consumer, and the isolation, the addiction, the disempowerment that develops with that addiction, and how that assists in the the political dissolution of organised workers that consumerism amidst real poverty seems to inculcate?
Did they already know this in the 1960s?
Here's a recent find, for me, saw a reference to it in a tweet. The Paper I mentioned above.
The 1982 Cabinet Report
Long term plans, a few words to start the ball rolling. This memorandum was released to public viewing under the 30 year rule. The original sits in the Kew Archives.
A document prepared in September 1982 for the Cabinet, discussing long term policy, including topically enough, privatisation of the NHS. They had just 'won' the Falklands War.
I have some of my own insight to offer, having read the paper twice.
What I see here.
The report was written by a senior civil servant, the late Robert Armstrong, an aristocrat by birth, inheritance and award.
What I see here is that it is that the politicians operate as the public front, they shield the Establishment ruling class within the Civil Service, who direct and influence the the politicians as much as the corporate billionaires do.
The public facing politician's function is, in part, to take the popular ire 'on the chin' in the theatre we call The News, to protect The System, safe in the knowledge that their pension and future wealth is secured and that custodial sentencing is not likely, under any circumstances, no matter how egregious their behaviour.
The adulation of the monarchy preserves the status of the aristocracy, as a political power base rooted in the class system, and it maintains the power of the aristocracy through the undemocratic House of Lords. Take away the monarchy and the House of Lords crumbles. Lords and robber barons dominate our political situation.
Here is a brief report from the Health Policy forum on the NHS part of Cabinet Document.
Documents disclosed in December 2012 revealed that Thatcher's Cabinet had considered radical reform of the NHS. The Central Policy Review Staff prepared a paper for a Cabinet meeting on 6 September 1982, outlining longer-term funding options of public services.
The Cabinet considered introducing private health insurance and increasing or extending user charges. The Cabinet paper suggested that some of the options reviewed in the paper would represent the end of the NHS for the majority of the population:
'Even though a free state service would be retained for the uninsured and possibly for the non-working population, for the majority the change would represent the abolition of the NHS. To save substantial sums involves raising existing charges and breaking unpopular ground in three areas - imposing charges (eg for drugs) on patients who are now exempt (eg children); charging for seeing the general practitioner; and for hospital treatment.'
Pdf file of the document, 30 pages on carefully typed paper, photographed. Take a look. It's informative.
The Theme
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Repeated throughout in this Cabinet Paper of 1982 is the concept of using gradual withdrawal of State support on all measures that effectively abolish poverty, to 'reduce real value of benefits' and to do so as a behavioural lever, and to mask it in the language of 'saving expenditure' in order to protect Wealth Extraction.
To give people who might be in need, and on benefits, an incentive to "see the attraction of low paid work".
Who needs low paid workers?
Who extracts the most real value from low paid workers? Exactly. The Boss earns more by not doing any cleaning work. The cleaner gets just enough to get by, no more. More for the boss. Maybe the cleaners children will get a better job, but not all of them, They need low paid workers, and they desire to maintain some visible poverty as a behavioural incentive. The system could be set to eliminate poverty, low wages. It's a systemic problem.
Then there's this : the relaxed sense of entitlement to impose privatisation, for profit, to render democracy safe for power by treating citizens as consumers, rather than State provision, free at point of use, accessible to all, citizens as persons, people.
The social programs that abolish real and relative poverty also include support to maintain clean water, cheap energy, mail, communications, rent capped at % or ratio of income, social housing, education, public transport, roads and rail, health care, old age care, care for disabled and other vulnerable groups.
The poorer you are the more likely you will face a need you cannot meet on your own, and find yourself stuck in a pretty horrible place, as a human being, a person. Think about what Health Care costs causing bankruptcy and poverty means. Think then of not being able to access further quality health care because of that poverty. Think of the slow suffering of the many, many people faced with real poverty and chronic disease. Horrible, terrifying, precarious.
Using intentional restriction of support as a behavioural modification utility.
here is a comment from page 7, paragraph 16 :
"Some of the options would make some people word off. But it is very difficult - sometimes impossible - to effect changes in the role of Government without making some people worse off, particularly where public expenditure and hence taxation are involved. It is therefore necessary to accept that possibility, whilst always recognising that it is the proper function and duty of the Government to ensure that no-one is made so much worse off that he or she is subjected to undue hardship.
If poverty is thought of as a relative condition, adverse redistributive effects become hard to accept. If, however, it is recognised that there is such a thing as an absolute level of poverty from which people should be protected. and that poor people should share in the increasing wealth of the country, but perhaps mot in full proportion, then some redistributive effects can be accepted - as they must be if the amount of wealth for distribution is to increase."
In other words in order to maintain poverty as a whip, as a nudge, the system will need to offer just enough support to people to avoid destitution, just enough support to make low paid work attractive and they will use media to portray that choice to work as being 'honourable' and that all of this subterfuge and rigging is essential to the continuation of that which generates their Wealth.
The tone between 'redistribution' and 'distribution' of wealth is worth noting.
Poverty as an incentive to push the population into work. Sado-Monetarism.
Poverty level benefits to force people to accept low paid jobs.
"The reduction in the real value of benefits for those of working age would increase incentives to work and increase the attraction of low paid work."
That would cause few problems:
"There would be an increase in real poverty and the current problems of social deprivation would be worsened (crime, poor care of children, illness from cold homes and poor nutrition."
Note they make no mention of the emotional and psychological stresses and chronic mental health of the people affected by poverty levels of support...
How it effects the people who must subsist on so little, how it afflicts their minds and hearts and bodies, as persons. That metric informs Corbyn and most decent people's naturally benign disposition. Most people are decent enough to recoil at that image, the suffering person, suffering because of Government policy that is designed to support the extraction of wealth.
That humane empathy is absent in this document.
Shunak is operating the old tradition to the tee!
The writer, Robert Armstrong, a life long civil servant, and very much a member of the ruling class, mentions in the document the problems they'd have to spend more on, the symptoms of increased real terms poverty - the social, community level stressors of poverty and the behavioural change as poverty impacts peoples lives and causes harm. They acknowledge that poverty causes low level criminality, neglect and disease.
Because it's a money thing. The person at the other end of this power transaction is not in the room. They are not valued.
Take away a little slice of support at a time via reform to nudge to citizen along a behavioural track, based on a deeply biased mis-understanding about people and our needs... as in rating and relating to people as economic units, as workers in the industries the ruling class own, and their children as future workers, whose work is needed in order to increase wealth 'redistribution', which as we see with Shunak's Autumn Budget 2021.
Less support for the poor, more support for the very, very rich.
Cash flow into the coffers of the billionaires. That money tree remains, always.
Government's role in the mind of The Owner Ruling Class is to funnel State revenue - currency, taxation, subsidies into the Wealth Extraction system, it's job is to legislate to protect that Wealth Extraction, and it is to never cede that legislative power to workers. Make concessions if we must, but never cede power.
Here's an excerpt on the NHS from the planning discussion document.
"As living standards rise, individuals are likely to demand more and better health care. There is some social gain from improved health care, but mostly it is a matter of individual wants and choices (income-elastic demand). Hence it is arguably not appropriate for public finance, and puts a strain on the Exchequer by distorting choices and shifting the burden from the consumer to the taxpayer. Public health services also tend to be led by the producers rather than consumers.
It is therefore worth considering whether over a period the provision health care for the bulk of the population could be shifted from the State to privately owned and run medical facilities. Those who could not afford to pay would then have their charges me by the State, in the form of rebate or reimbursement. As an exception to the general rule, it might be judged more efficient for the stay to provide institutional care for long stay patients (mentally handicapped, elderly) who clearly could not afford to contribute.
This would mean leaving to individuals how far they insured against facing high costs of health care, and it would be important to monitor the growth of private health insurance over the intervening period.
Given that the State would in the last resort meet the costs of necessary health care, they could be a danger of under-insurance by a large part of the working population, and thought might therefore have to be given to a scheme for compulsory private insurance.
If ministers accept the broad concept as a longer-term objective, they will want to judge more immediate health options as steps along the road. In particular they will want an examination of how far the switch from public to private provision of health care could be promoted, and whether there are an institutional changes, within the NHS, that could make this switch easier.
1. Increased and extended health charges
2. Private Health Insurance."
The document discusses Social Care.
Then the document looms over privatisation of Education, page 4, paragraph 11, discussing the move towards wholesale privatisation, slowly, slowly, starting promoting more private schools, reducing State spending on State Schools. 1 982.
"Plans to remove a £50 million school improvement fund for councils will be seen as a “thinly veiled attempt to turn up the heat” on maintained schools to convert to academy status, a headteachers' union has said this afternoon.
The Department for Education has launched a consultation today on removing the local authority School Improvement Monitoring and Brokering Grant.
Instead, the plan would be for councils to fund all of their school improvement activity by taking a slice of funding directly from school budgets."
Defence: Annexe K, page 29
A warmer discussion in tone. We have money for the Military. Military is growing. Maybe we can persuade NATO to increase the mandatory spend. Background is that Defence spending was increasing in real value and budget had to find ways maintain 'real value'.
Previously they were discussing cuts to social programs as incentives in to work. Now they are the discussing the impact of 'an absence of real growth in the defence budget, as against the increase of complexity and cost of major equipment, would entail a reduction in United Kingdom Military Capabilities."
No cuts to their real value budget, to incentivise the military into peace, then?
Cuts to social support designed to nudge behaviour by the stress of real poverty.
Would eschewing maintaining an expeditionary army incentivise a country to behave more like a peacemaker? Perish that thought, now!
One rule for the Rulers, a swath of rules and sanctions for us. To get us to behave. Behaving didn't get the Unions far in the 1890s onwards, that's for sure.
Misinformation, preventing manipulative political grooming.
It is maddening how disruptive Oligarchy funded think tanks and their proxy movements, led by guile and grooming, cry 'Freedom' for all the elements that support the long term strategic planning of the Ruling Class thinking they are doing the exact opposite.
The opposite of that strategic operation is grass roots cohesion, which itself is based on accurate understanding of the situation. awareness of how division is encouraged, how emotions are exploited, how lack of information can be a vulnerability and a curiosity to see that we the wage earning ordinary folk build an equitable culture amongst ourselves that translates into votes and healthier legislators.
How to make government safe for people?
So I have been thinking many years on this - as have many, many others, and far more education and knowledgeable than I could ever be. I set out in 2017 a metric for healthy governance.
"I think of Healthy Governance as being focused on the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community.
Healthy governance sets the context of governance as operating within as a shared responsibility of duty of care for one another. In that regards healthy governance has to be evidence led at all times. Opinion and belief are insufficient to meet the responsibility of duty of care.
Healthy governance sets the global context of governance as nurturing, caring for and stewarding of the habitat within which the community lives and from which that community draws living materials and other resources."
Now consider the policy choices of this Westminster Government during the past 20 months on managing the national epidemic and the global pandemic, in the light of all of the above, and perhaps some of what that have and continue to do makes more sense - "let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard."
In my view there's a degree of cruelty and callous recklessness in all of this that is deeply, profoundly uncivilised bordering on sado-monetarism. The gaslighting and lying to maintain that trajectory is a huge red flag.
I know that the only way for the people to counter this is to build a united grass roots front, from a shared sense of human solidarity, as persons, from the poorest to the most comfortable that elects decent men and women into our legislatures.
Stephen Reicher on why elimination of community transmission prevents surges, lockdowns and restrictions - precisely because the protocols when carefully set, give the population more choice, more freedom.
"What we need right now, to supplement the vaccine rollout, is a set of protections and support measures to reduce the harm inflicted by Covid and relieve pressure on the NHS. In order to make that clear, politicians and journalists need to reframe the way they talk about the pandemic. Stop asking: will the public stick to the restrictions? Instead ask: will the government protect and support the public to keep one another other safe?
The real irony is that, by conflating protection with lockdown and refusing to implement the protections necessary to bring infections down, keep people safe and relieve the pressure on the NHS, this increases the likelihood, as Sage noted this month, that more draconian measures will be needed in the future.
In the end (and as we saw last year), the true lockdown party would be the 'do nothing' party."
Mr, Reicher is on point, and utterly correct.
What say you?
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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