It's time to get real about what's really going on with our politicians

... and I'm talking worldwide. Why do we have anti-immigration parties in the UK and other European countries, along with the "Fuck off we're full" types in Australia and the people who scream at South American children in the U.S.?

Because we're all fighting over table scraps.

Why should anyone who struggles to pay their bills, keep their homes and provide for their loved ones begrudge anyone who is trying to move to a country where they can pay their bills, have a place to live and provide for their loved ones? It's not natural. We tend to admire those who are willing to put in the effort to make it.

No, we're being misdirected by people who don't want us to focus on the real problem, the fact that the wealthy cannot be satisfied with having more than most of us can dream of, and instead are aspiring to out-do one another in a quest to have more than any of us is capable of dreaming of.

Why does big business want free immigration? Because they want the only jobs they offer to be the ones performed by Pacific Rim-style wage slaves. And anti-immigration movements come along to blame anybody but the culprit for what is really happening.

Every argument that the wealthy should "give back" is immediately twisted into a narrative about people demanding welfare benefits, but how about just decent jobs? How about the idea that in the countries where they earn so much profit, they should at least employ a bunch of people at a wage at which they can live in dignity?

I promise you, fighting about the Romanians or the Mexicans or the asylum-seekers isn't doing a damn thing. Whether through the power of their elected representatives, or directly, the majority of humanity has to start hitting back and telling the people who run our economic engines that maybe having the top executive earn several thousand times as much as the company's lowest-paid employee isn't acceptable. Maybe even that it's obscene.

[ /rant ]

There is nothing anyone can do about it though unless people are prepared to make major changes.

In short what is needed is a revolution.

Talking about the UK people need to remove their services. They need to go on strike. They need to actually do it. And yes that includes nurses and schoolteachers and that means lives will be disrupted.

This won't happen though.

The fatcat Elite will just continue to rule and the prole underclass will continue to allow themselves to be mistreated and manipulated.

Nurses should strike? So you do not mind if your Husband/ Father or anyone dies in their Hospital bed covered in shit and starving? Many of the nurses we have now don't give a fcuk about people in their care. Whats this shit about them striking for more money,the lowest paid Nurse starts on £24,000 a year,A Ward Sister gets £32,000, they have nothing to complain about.

Are you familiar with the 'free rider' problem in economic theory?

Wiki wrote:In economics, the free rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in either an under-provision of those goods or services, or in an overuse or degradation of a common property resource. The free rider problem is the question of how to limit free riding and its negative effects in these situations. The free rider problem may occur when property rights are not clearly defined and imposed. An opposite concept is that of a forced rider.

The free rider problem is common among public goods. These are goods that have two characteristics: non-excludability — once provided it is for everybody; you cannot stop anyone from using it — and non-rivalry — when you consume the good, it does not reduce the amount available to others. The potential for free riding exists when people are asked to voluntarily pay for a public good.

Although the term "free rider" was first used in economic theory of public goods, similar concepts have been applied to other contexts, including collective bargaining, antitrust law, psychology and political science. For example, some individuals in a team or community may reduce their contributions or performance if they believe that one or more other members of the group may free ride. In a labor union, free riding occurs if an employee pays no union dues or agency shop fees, but benefits from union representation. One free rides to profit from a stock trade without actually using any of his or her own capital.

Then there is the logic of collective action, which is...

Wiki wrote:...a theory of political science and economics of concentrated benefits versus diffuse costs. Its central argument is that concentrated minor interests will be overrepresented and diffuse majority interests trumped, due to a free-rider problem that is stronger when a group becomes larger.

The rich have the power to concentrate.

nicko wrote:Nurses should strike?   So you do not mind if your Husband/ Father or anyone dies in their Hospital bed covered in shit and starving? Many of the nurses we have now  don't give a fcuk about people in their care. Whats this shit about them striking for more money,the lowest paid Nurse starts on £24,000 a year,A Ward Sister gets £32,000, they have nothing to complain about.

In the end economic success is about power.  Striking nurses withhold their services to show consumers that they would be "covered in shit and starving" if they don't pay a nurse what he/she is worth.

A rich man withholds his products and/or services to show consumers that they would be "covered in shit and starving" if they don't pay the higher price he wants to charge.

Both are doing the same thing.  Withholding supply.

For the typical conservative, the rich man is the epitome of the clever person who makes wise choices, outsmarting everyone else  But the striking nurses are an uncontrolled mob, guided by socialistic principles in order to freeload off of society.

Tough titty, Said the kitty,
But the milk's still good!

NICKO thinks 24k a year is good money...

OBVIOUSLY the old fool is still living back in the 1980s ==> the stupid little prick missed out on a little thing called "inflation" over the last 30+ years !

(I WONDER if he's aware that qualified American, Aussie and Kiwi nurses and teachers are being employed in England for around $US100k a year ~ that's over 60 thousand pounds sterling; so yes ~ British nurses DO have something to complain about, with reference to their starting_wages..).

THE very fact that flicko believes that a Uni' graduate should be happy with 24k a year shows just what a clueless and gormless little dick he is..

ALSO note that el pricko considers the nurses job is simply cleanibg up the elderly and infirm and making their beds ~ just how much more stupidly condescending and offkey can a righteous-wing rich man's pet Tory lapdog get these days ?    

FluffyBunny wrote:There is nothing anyone can do about it though unless people are prepared to make major changes.

In short what is needed is a revolution.

Talking about the UK people need to remove their services. They need to go on strike. They need to actually do it. And yes that includes nurses and  schoolteachers and that means lives will be disrupted.

This won't happen though.

The fatcat Elite will just continue to rule and the prole underclass will continue to allow themselves to be mistreated and manipulated.

I absolutely agree. In fact, I'm a big fan of an idea that Cory Doctorow described in his book For the Win -- in it, internet-connected workers created a global labor union.

A GLOBAL. LABOR. UNION. Think about the strike pay that could be afforded by an organization that collected dues from a massive global membership. That could really be a way to stage a totally peaceful revolution.

According to Forbes:

The CEOs of America's 500 biggest companies got a collective pay raise of 16% last year earning total compensation of $5.2 billion.

That wasn't total compensation -- that was just raises! Let's say that those millionaires and billionaires tried, somehow, to make it one year without a raise (shocking idea, I know. I have done it plenty of years, but I have absolutely no idea how I survived).

Just what the richest CEOs received in raises would have provided for 100,000 new jobs that each paid a quite-decent $50K per year. Plenty of Americans make it on that kind of salary -- I do just fine with less.

Or to look at in another way, 200,000 people currently struggling on $25K per year could have been elevated to a decent, living wage.

Instead, that $5 billion was spent on 500 people who did not need it and will probably never spend very much of it. And I can't emphasize enough -- we're not even talking about lowering their salaries, just about cutting their raises.

the only solution is violence which is why they are trying so hard to demonise it... they know they deserve the guillotine. so they convince us the mob is evil, the mob is the people and sometimes the people are right.
Since the early days of society as far back as the creation of Athens and Sparta Violent revolution is the way forward, Kings need to be over thrown to allow democracy, to make an omelette you need to break some eggs.
Roman senators learned to fear the wraith of the mob and that caused them to moderate their greed and quest for all the wealth by issuing grain doles and public games to keep the masses entertained... no doubt that is the purpose of all the resources poured in to entertainment now and the ready availability of Cheap Fast food to keep stomachs of the poor bloated (yet with malnutrition to keep them weak )

nicko wrote:Nurses should strike?   So you do not mind if your Husband/ Father or anyone dies in their Hospital bed covered in shit and starving? Many of the nurses we have now  don't give a fcuk about people in their care. Whats this shit about them striking for more money,the lowest paid Nurse starts on £24,000 a year,A Ward Sister gets £32,000, they have nothing to complain about.

That is HEAPS to complain about traditionally the average house is 5 times the average wage And Nurse Definitely deserve at least the average.

London, with an overall average price of £516,304 was more expensive than nearby South East (£322,362), East of England (£258,118) and East Midlands (£170,809).

So if things were as fair for nurses as they were in the past, they would be on at least 60K.

Too few people are taking all the resources, it is only natural (based on the Humans societies over the past 3 thousand years). For the good of society there is occasionally the need for the suffering of the few, take them to the Guillotines, fill the coffers with their confiscated wealth. Fix the NHS, Public education and all the other infrastructure and allow the UK economy to function again as wealth gets redistributed to those that ACTUALLY do the work.

wait a few centuries and do it again

A picture paints a thousand words

Westminster’s upper house – which still contains 92 hereditary peers, people who inherited their position by virtue of their birth – has become a parody of its own posh stereotype by publicly favouring champagne over cost-cutting.

The Observer reported that the peers rejected a proposal to save money by merging their catering department with lowly MPs from the House of Commons “because the Lords feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service”.

The revelation by former clerk of the Commons Sir Malcolm Jack came last week during a governance committee examining Westminster’s operations, and was reportedly met with “gasps and open laughter”.

The chair of the governance committee, Jack Straw, could barely believe what he had heard. “Did you make that up? Is that true?” he asked, to which Jack responded that it was indeed so.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/champagne-superscandal

Bloody shocking. And to think that they get £300 quid a day just for turning up. That's more than many people get for a whole week working where the have to do a full 40 hours and they have to pay all the costs of getting there as well as paying for their own meals.

Shut the bloody place or reform it to stop all this nonsense.

I wish the super rich would pay their fair share of income and sales taxes like everybody else has to do. I wish the do-nothing RW politicians would get off their asses and close loopholes that allow rich crooks to evade taxes and store their wealth in off-shore accounts. This is no different from laundering drug money. Large corporations and crooks like the Koch brothers need to be forced to support the USA and man up and be the patriotic, law-abiding hardworking citizens the rest of us are. We need to ban lobbyists and outlaw legal campaign bribes known as PAC money. The rich need to help pay (bigger share) for infrastructure repairs and, instead of emptying our treasury, they need to get off their greedy asses and fill it back up.

See you should have copied the French
VIVA LA REVOLUTION
take them to the Guillotines, fill the coffers with their confiscated wealth.

Lurker wrote:I wish the super rich would pay their fair share of income and sales taxes like everybody else has to do. I wish the do-nothing RW politicians would get off their asses and close loopholes that allow rich crooks to evade taxes and store their wealth in off-shore accounts. This is no different from laundering drug money. Large corporations and crooks like the Koch brothers need to be forced to support the USA and man up and be the patriotic, law-abiding hardworking citizens the rest of us are. We need to ban lobbyists and outlaw legal campaign bribes known as PAC money. The rich need to help pay (bigger share) for infrastructure repairs and, instead of emptying our treasury, they need to get off their greedy asses and fill it back up.

Damn Right, it is the same here Gina Rinehart saying Aussies should all be paid less because she can Pay less in Africa and she should be allowed to make the Maximum profit. She has has spent more on donations to political parties to remove safety regulations and reduce wages than she has paid in taxes.

Like Many I am All for sending her to the Guillotine and taking all the assets off her and family as they are ill gotten inheritance from the age of Racism and denial of indigenous rights.

We had riots here in the UK and in the aftermath Peter Oborne (a journalist with the Telegraph) wrote this article.

The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom

You should read it because it was the best article I read about the whole thing.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/