Police Pay Cuts

The police wage bill is £11 billion and this is around 75% of total spending.  The real cuts being made aren’t as advertised – the bulk of the savings are ‘back door’ through the inflation being stoked up through QE and our farcical focus on financial services and the speculative economy.  If we are lucky, two years down the line the average cop wage will be worth 20% less than last year. The cuts themselves are typical of the tinkering done across the public sector.  Wages generally have been in decline since the 1970s.  If one was able to price police pay to market, they would be much lower – perhaps 30% less.  I’m not advocating this, just pointing to the obvious market conditions.  I don’t believe much if any of the pay targeted at the front line will get there.

The situation is almost the reverse of that in the late 60’s when police pay had fallen way behind in an environment of generally rising wages.  We threatened and later voted for strike action then.  Hard to justify in these circumstances.  The only way to get higher wages is it insist on them across the board and for full employment.

The current offer is no or less business-as-usual and doesn’t represent the kind of radical overhaul the CJS needs.  Cops will be less well off like the rest of us except the rich top 10%.  This is what most of them voted for, though one expects they didn’t know as it would have happened if Labour had won.

Our force showed no signs of knowing who its best officers were and who among them was prepared to concoct criminal lies to cover their bad work.  I have no faith in performance based pay when such basics are not entertained.

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Wages Only Rise After Black Death and War

If you scan this blog you may believe I’d think IMF stands for international mother-fuckers, and of course, you’d be right.  Despite being murderers on an industrial scale over many years, these turds don’t vary much in postured economics from me.  Of course, I don’t believe in austerity that kills children like them, but take a look at what they post on income inequality – http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/09/index.htm

I grew up under expectations that people were becoming more equal and that fairness was on the increase.  In fact, as the IMF confirm, the rich have been stealing in vast amounts.  The inequality leads to ‘current acount’ deficits and massive indebtedness, at least in economies with developed banking.

Generally, wages don’t rise unless workers are killed off in sufficient numbers to be in short supply.  Pestilence and war are good for wages.  Another way to produce this good situation for workers, without killing them off in droves, is to guarantee something like twice the current minimum wage for jobs in a system structured to employ sufficient people to remove the reserve army of labour and force employers to give better pay and conditions to their people.  That is change the current dominance of the employer.  Why not do this across the EU – to fuck off the standard anti-democratic bastard excuse we can do nothing because of international competition and capital flight?  This solution is just as economic a model as belief the private sector cavalry is coming.

Whilst I believe high wages (as in Scandinavia) are an answer along with full employment and EU protectionism, this is essentially a short to medium perspective.  We should be asking ‘why wages’ in the sense of trying to discover how property ownership and wealth possession give any individual or group rights not to work for what they get as beneficiaries in our society.

Our high earners now ‘earn’ so much they could retire after a couple of years – even the likes of bungling social service directors – and have more to live on than some poor sod dragging the plough for 40 more years.  This kind of disparity must lead to something like the queen bee being structured in our human society, demanding as much of the fruits of labour without the beneficial genetic future such a queen provides (the science is complicated, but a queen passes on more genes that a worker has than the worker on her own could).

The ‘motivation’ in a hive stands up from a bottom-up perspective.  In human affairs all we hear is the drone that the already rich need even vaster riches to be arsed to get out of bed.  Down at the bread-line, crumbs are enough.    In the hive the resource costly queen actually provides a superior lineage of worker offspring (in the sense of more genetically similar offspring than a worker could produce in mating).  In human society, the resource costly rich gain all the advantage over many generations.  I’m now so sick of hearing how much this bunch of wasters are worth to the rest of us, that I think we should have a cull in order to test out the theory.  We could eliminate all financial services people (say 1 in 9 jobs – China has killed this proportion of Tibetans and all countries with imperialist history have managed worse) and see what happens.  Thought experiment only in my case, but don’t kid yourself our rulers care about such considerations – they’ve killed us in droves through history.

A whole shed-load of our soaked-up ideologies, Bacon’s Idols that still enthrall us, can ne looked at in reverse.  I’d put it this simply.  Why the fuck are we still arranging everything through an economics that exploits scarcity when we have the technology and wherewithal to live in plenty?  It isn’t because it works so well, and this means it must be because it’s the way non-democratic interests rule us.  Economics is the bewitchment of human reason through long-cast shadows of trauma.  Every argument in it can be turned on its head.  What makes me laugh is that all the spew about hard work, creativity, innovation and the rest, emerges in a population to idle to even understand basic economics.

Let’s face it, we’re so dumb and scared,we go along with all the crap on how ‘lovely’ hard work is, how great it is to turn in when your boss is a bully and an incompetent who gets ten times your pay.  We love work so much we are gone from it almost on rumour of a lottery win.  What liars we are and how easily we have fallen for the really big ones.  Show me the research on the deserving rich.  It’ll be a slim volume.