Enough is enough

Disgusting does not come close to describing the latest offering from Channel 5 - On Benefits And Proud - which aired for the first time this week.

In the show various benefit claimants - code for the undeserving poor - are tracked down by deserving taxpayers with the object of illustrating how these benefit junkies are ripping us all of - 'us' being the smug, self satisfied majority for whom poverty is just another word in the dictionary.

The sheer savagery of deriving entertainment from the plight of the poor - many of whom, yes, are uneducated, unrefined, and suffering one or more of the plethora of social maladies which flow from poverty - is compounded by recent figures released by The Trussell Trust, Britain's largest operator of foodbanks, that the number of foodbanks has trebled and that over 350,000 people have had to rely on food handouts since April. It is further compounded by the most recent Sunday Times Rich List, revealing that the collective wealth of the 1000 richest people in Britain reached a record level of £450 billion, up £35.4 billion from 2012, in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s and with poverty at an all time high.

As if this wasn't bad enough, energy companies announcing an 8 percent hike in prices just in time for winter is quite literally a death sentence for many poor pensioners, for whom survival will now no longer be possible.

The only conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the objective of society is now the eradication of the poor rather than poverty, beginning with the demonisation and dehumanisation of those daring to claim the pittance in benefits which the government and its supporters has deemed an act of theft against hard pressed taxpayers and those in work.

It is class war by any other name, made worse by the undeniable truth of the success of the Right in pitting members of the same class against one another - i.e. low wage workers against unemployed workers, the able bodied against the disabled, non immigrant against immigrant, and so on.

Karl Marx opined in his Communist Manifesto that the class struggle is 'sometimes open sometimes hidden'. A trip to the local Jobcentre or Magistrates/Sheriff Court on any given day is where you will find it wide open and in full sway.

In the former, the poor are bullied, harassed, hounded, while in the latter they are punished for crimes in the main connected inextricably to their poverty. Indeed and increasingly it has become harder to differentiate between a Jobcentre and a courtroom, such has been the level of attacks on benefit claimants, wherein the relationship between your average Jobseekers Adviser and claimant resembles that between a parole officer and convicted criminal.

The fact that the vast majority of those working in Jobcentres are union members provides conclusive proof that class consciousness is at an all time low in twenty first century Britain.

The human despair that is afflicting more and more people up and down the country - men, woman, and children - as a result of the Government's addiction to austerity hasn't been this prevalent since Charles Dickens was documenting it in his classic works at the end of the nineteenth century. Over a hundred years on we have come full circle with the normalisation of extreme poverty and extreme wealth sitting side by side, with human worth measured by both.

The status quo cannot hold. Something has to give. Indeed, the surprise is that it hasn't given already in the form of riots and a social explosion. These unrelenting attacks on the most economically vulnerable people in society are redolent of children trapping a bumble bee in a jar and shaking it up and down to watch the bee in distress. It really is this savage, inviting a savage response on the part of its victims.

The rich, the smug middle classes, working people who've bought into the lie that their problems are the fault of those below them in the income scale rather than those above them, are playing with fire. People will not go quietly to their own destruction. All it takes is a spark for the present despair and its paralysing effect to turn to rage and an eruption the like of which this country has never seen.

With no mainstream political party standing four square on the side of the poor, such as the Labour Party once did, members of the political class who exist in a bubble of moral superiority from which they like to pontificate about fairness, hardworking families, shirkers and strivers, should take note that this is not a game.

None other than he ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle understood this. When he opined that "Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime" he could have been describing British society in 2013.

We already know what crime looks like. It is published in the pages of the Sunday Times Rich List year after year. It comes in the shape of the Bedroom Tax, food banks, zero hour contracts, the sanctioning, withdrawal, and cutting of Jobseekers Allowance, Disability Benefits, and Housing Benefit.

Yes, we already know what crime looks like.

We have yet to see revolution.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-wight/these-relentless-attacks-_b_4107076.html?show_comment_id=293381952&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#comment_293381952


It's getting so bad now, i've been storing up extra tins of food for months, and with blackouts being predicted for this winter and the first time since the 70's in this country am getting a color gas heater and gas drums....It will kick off big time soon.

Read the comments to the article.

Well don't you wish, 200 years ago your ancestors were poor enough to be rounded up and shipped to the other side of the world     

at least here we are seeing what is going on there and more people are trying to prevent it.

As we are founded when the induastrial era caused the same sort of shit, our founding fathers are the poverty stricken that were sent to be little more than slaves for the british empire. So Aussie Patriotism and Anti-Authoritian / Anti-inherited Wealth, goes hand in hand.

veya_victaous wrote:Well don't you wish, 200 years ago your ancestors were poor enough to be rounded up and shipped to the other side of the world     

at least here we are seeing what is going on there and more people are trying to prevent it.

As we are founded when the induastrial era caused the same sort of shit, our founding fathers are the poverty stricken that were sent to be little more than slaves for the british empire. So Aussie Patriotism and Anti-Authoritian / Anti-inherited Wealth, goes hand in hand.

Well, yes of course that was very disgusting...Saw a film recently about the kids that were trafficked to Australia. I'm no fan of the British Empire veya although i probably benefited from it in some way or other but not through choice.

I think that you will find that England played a key role in ending slavery though, a quick look at the history books would confirm that fact! :D 

Let's not dwell too much on the past eh!  

yeah
but it ended slavery, then created the convict class.
literally people who may or may not have stolen something as pitiful as a loaf of bread got told your choice is either the Gallows
or stuffed on a boat that will take you to the otherside of the world, half of you will die on the way there but if You do survive and can complete a sentence of hard labor (that could be decades long) you will be set free. Rich free settlers were than Given convicts to put to work clearing lands, quarrying, farming etc.

Anyway the point was, those poor suckers decendants (Aussies) are better off now than the those that Stayed in England. Even if you did beat us a cricket this year    

And History Books Say that cause Aussies don't write them, it isn't the only thing opinion of Churchill for example is Completely opposite, if we wrote the history books, He's the Coward that wanted us to Give up against the Japanese.

You mustn't have enough Boat people (refugees) for the media to demonize     

As always
VIVA LA REVOLUTION

veya_victaous wrote:You mustn't have enough Boat people (refugees) for the media to demonize      

As always
VIVA LA REVOLUTION

Yer and all of that  

Reminds me of an astute observation that was made here in America five years ago and, predictably, twisted into THE WORST THING ANYONE HAS EVER SAID EVER:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." - Barack Obama, campaigning in 2008

The fact is, part of being the ruling class is being a master at manipulation. You lost your job? It's the fault of the illegal immigrants, and by extension "those people, up there" in Washington D.C. who are not like you in anyway and in fact want to see you suffer! Obama was totally right -- people facing serious uncertainties cling to their perception that they can defend themselves with their guns and the certainty that evil is punished and good rewarded that they take from their religion. And especially, they scapegoat.

It's made me wonder more than once whether the good guys shouldn't be mastering these tactics and employing them to improve the world.

the thing is here and in the UK it isn't the unemployed or the low classes that is is complaining it is the middle classes. As I am now technically a member of the middle class I can sort of see why. You have enough to not get gov't assistance and be paying taxes towards the gov't assitance of others, but then cant afford a home and not alot better off than the lower classes but putting in a lot more work. Always aspiring to the upper classes or at least that little bit richer is depressing and difficult and the gap between even the 'well off' (let alone middle class)and the real Rich is HUGE, the Well off have a nice big house but the real rich have 7 and then earn outrageuous rents off the other 6 making them ever richer.

So the middle classes are scared there are going to lose the small slither of the economic pie that they have secured, even though they are far more likely to lose it to the rich, the rich spend money to convince the middle the are 'really' losing it to all the low class hangers on (people that just get the crumbs of the economic pie) or those that want to come from overseas to get themselves a piece of our economic pie.

really we just need to take some pie off the few that have big slices. which brings us back to ....

As always
VIVA LA REVOLUTION