People my age generally grew up with notions like a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and the idea that we were all publicly equal even if the system was one of fairly rough just and approximate meritocracy. We helped each other out as far as we could and thought people should get a hand up. Our core values were in this and some seemed to pass into legislation on working conditions, anti-racism and assumed human rights.
This has almost disappeared in a very traditional historic manner with poisons of luxury, excess and decadence. The world’s rich have manipulated this and most of us were willing participants and probably thought the world was getting fairer and a better place to live in .
I fell none of this now, only indignant and somewhat shamed by the decadence. I have no public politics, other than the scornful ‘they’re all the same’ – even if I’d have voted Labour had my MP not been known to me as a shit (I think cutting less better economics, like the Japanese). There are no sensible policies and no one dares to take on the Politburo of the rich and the politicians who become their hangers-on..
We could work our way out of the current mess – but everyone has to sign up to the work and we have to stop wealth accumulating in the form that adds burden to the work through ‘rents’ – a classic economic term you won’t hear much of on television. There has to be incentive to work and be doing the right kind of work. This has generally meant money and other work-related benefits like sick pay and pensions. But none of this has to mean indentured work to rich people – the current and general road to serfdom. Equal opportunities are mythical when wealth gives its offsprings so great an advantage as they have in our societies.
We’re nearly all still offended when a bunch of travelers arrive on common land and start ‘borrrowing’ stuff, using gardens as toilets and make off leaving damage and litter behind with no offer to help cleaning up and putting things back the way they were. What we have failed to notice is that group of people who do us much greater damage and who are demanding ‘Danegeld’. Much of this is cult-like and the cult is ‘leadership’, pretty much in protection racket form.
Subsistence farmers don’t put in extra work for extra crops if they just get stolen – some part of Africa’s bane. The stealing in our economies is now predominantly financial and unlike burglary we can’t insure against it and have to foot the bill. Capitalism has collapsed under ‘securitisation’ which is really, in practice, Voodoo mathematics combined with theft. Markets now resemble those under Russian Mafia control after the collapse of the soviets – just means of creating high prices to ensure the protection percentage. Footballers more behave like the bosses of organised crime, flaunting wealth and loose morals.
When games are played in the open like chess and soccer we can see the skills on offer, but this is not true of financial services and its doubtful any great skills exist – much more likely that the hidden games are criminal and rigged. Even where we can see the skills there is no need to inflate wages to today’s ludicrous levels. We can use salary caps – and for every Rooney there are thousands more who play and thus play a part in creating Rooney. To the winner the spoils is a vile statement from war, not competitive sport. The idea on the day, as in today’s brilliant State of Origin (rugby league), may be to drill the opposition into the soil – but the idea is also not to kill the Competition itself. And the idea certainly isn’t to buy up all the assets of the Competition and rent them back to amateur players. Nor is it to build a high incline pitch and change the rules so your side always plays downhill or buy the referees. Sepp Blatter was low in my opinion before, but what kind of moron goes for photo-opportunities with Mugabe in the middle of a corruption scandal! Like our politicians and wealthy, he can get away with it because we have no way to stop them. Or have been tranced into believing we can’t.
We need our values back and back in work in our societies – the trouble is these very values are being used to control us in Doublespeak. 42% of the richest country (USA) are poor, half of us in the UK own less than 5% of what can be given a monetary value. And it’s getting worse and ‘they’ are attacking even that. We really know life is very unfair – because we move house, go to church and other stuff to get our children into good schools or pay for them to miss the State system. We are so corrupt to pretend children are getting skills through ejukation – but really we are just keeping them as children longer and skewing the job market and decent wages to take up those properly networked. What has built up is not a skills base, but massive unemployment, under-employment and qualifications unrelated to intelligence or work skills. The same people win as when I was a grammar schoolboy – what’s changed is the losers do even worse, partly because we can’t call a spade a spade. Some kids, probably 50%, don’t get school. Instead of pretending they can, we should provide work and National Service based learning from 14 (the end of the third secondary year). Everyone else should do a year of this as part of university entry.
To generate the work and National Service we should engage in New Deal projects aimed at producing technology, energy supplies and social capital creation. Everyone should do 6 weeks basic barracks-based training and we should have a national management development programme through the TA involving the overall project. This should run across the EU (sorry Dickie!).
Again, across the EU, we should have a debt jubilee of cross-canceling debt between nations and public discussion on how not to end up paying rent to a richman’s Politburo of accumulated wealth, or any command centre we can’t control (surely the Chinese would never have authorised theirs to build ghost cities while they live cheek by jowl with the buildings empty). There are challenges to our values in this – but surely not to our basic ones. We need what we generally think capitalism and risk-taking is in doing this, not the burdensome type we’ve ended-up with and its focus on secrecy and money making money in a Ponzi scheme of bent accounting funded by mugs with no stake in profits (us).
Personally, I’d like to see a move away from ADMASS vomit – no prohibition but some genuine ability to choose what we get out of the hands of BBC worthies and advertisers. I shouldn’t have to pay for soccer to watch rugby, or fund soap operas.
Work needs to be got back to wages and sensible conditions – not unearned incomes. There’s much more to say, but the silence in our politics – one of utter failure – is deafening. Only one 16 to 20 year old in the US is working and we are no better. Financial malarkey is dwarfing the work economy and we have all sorts fiddling about in problems of the poor and criminal created because there is no right to a decent job.
Our worthies do not seem amenable to justice and big companies are making law through lobby. We are being downgraded from citizenship. Looking around at my fellow countrymen I despair and am planning to leave. I hope I never mention the ultimate ex-pat phrase, ‘the white cliffs of Dover are such a great sight as you leave’, and I’m not going as I once did OHMS, just to get away. I’d rather stay and fight, but I just see cops and other public sector workers being our best paid and can’t see this is just because their wages have been more difficult to attack than others and their jobs not as easily subject to foreign placement. Everyone is carping about the ‘evil poor’ who are about 2 % of our GDP – and much as they need discipline, I also want a society that can see the real game and not take it our on ‘new Jews’. We’re running scared and mean.
If we had politics, I’d feel I was able to vote against the obviously idiot wars our soldiers know nothing about other than that they are targets, that I could at least vote for an ‘anti-bwanking’ party, ethnic excuses for noise and criminality and fair rates of pay across the board. I can’t, so I may as well move to where the lecture theatres are comfortable, other staff helpful and students respectful and more friendly and the bus drivers on a fair screw. In short to the values of the land of my birth forgotten in my own.
Allcoppedout's Blog 