America has not yet implemented the necessary or heinous cuts, depending on your perspective, that parts of Europe has, instead focusing on stimulating economic growth and their economy is growing, slowly, but it is growing and unemployment is declining. Whereas the UK and let's face it Conservative government (I'm missing the Liberal Democratic element of this so-called coalition) have focussed on cuts which has directly resulted in stagnation. They have gone about cutting EMA; cutting housing benefits; cutting public sector jobs; whilst raising VAT; tripling tuition fees and simultaneously raising the interest rates on student loans; going after fraudulent benefit claimants but not tax evading corporations or rich people; re-jigging the NHS; making NEETs like me stack Tesco shelves for free, lest they cut off our generous allowance of £7 a day. Soon, there will be no such thing as Job Seekers Allowance, Housing Benefit etc as the Tories want to simplify everything (that they have never had to use and therefore do not understand) and make one universal credit. I asked my job seekers parole officer how he thought this was going to work in practice, he replied that 'the government are broke, so one credit system will probably mean they pay out less and so the recipients ends up with less money'. Anyway, I don't know if it's just me but it seems like this year has not only been the year I got married but also the year of austerity/privatisation/attack on the already fucking poor!!
Whether or not this crisis is mostly about debt the governments are struggling to pay back, compiled with the bad investments they and banks have made, it seems an obvious statement to make but why does joe taxpayer have to literally pay for it? The price of food, travel, goods and services keep rising and joe taxpayer has to keep getting poorer, and yet joe taxpayer is one of the lucky ones as that means he has a job!
The suggestion that a certain amount of debt, public and private should just be wiped out has been ridiculed as infeasible (see occupylsx.org). Prior to this crisis, many were campaigning for third world debt to be wiped out, it created a deep ditch of poverty which poor countries would never be able to dig their way out of because as much as they dug, the mud would still keep pouring in. All of this being designed on purpose of course. OK it's a crap analogy as I'm tired and it's midnight but my point is debt is fine if you are able to pay it back, it's interest or usury which has turned out to be the source of EVIL! The people who govern us are slavish to the speculators who have to be able to trust that our governments can pay their debts back. If they, whoever 'they' are, decide that the chances are slim, they up the interest rate, thereby making it harder and harder for the countries to return to economic health. People didn't seem to care too much about this before but now it's happening to the rich countries Western governments are even turning on each other, accusing other country's credit ratings of being worse than theirs <cough cough Sarkozy>, akin to the snitch in school who gets told off by the teacher and asks why another has not been told off too.
More privatisation in the UK cannot surely be the answer? Can you resolve a problem with what created it in the first place? Whether it's been through the front door or back door this has been the year of not so subtle privatisation, kicking the poor when they're already down. The free market has already ensured a massive wealth and class divide, the government has just exacerbated it. How dare Labour have wanted more than 50% of our young to go university?! says David Cameron. What a croc, let's make our universities as elite as they were in the Bullingdon days ay? They have also restored the Thatcher policy of discounting council houses HEAVILY (50% of market rate and only a 5% deposit needed) in order for tenants to buy them, thereby allowing them to get on the housing market, buy and sell until they attain coveted middle class status and reducing council housing even further. Thereby eliminating some poverty and exacerbating others! This is how the free market resolves 'itself' of course! Sometimes I wake up and think I'm either dreaming or the world is some sort of sick joke* This was 2011 bitches...
*For more sick jokes see North Koreans hysterically sobbing at the death of Kim-Jong Il and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama ordering a troop surge in Afghanistan, collusion of militiary action in Libya and a few days ago approving arm sales of $11b to Iraq so the sectarian massacres can continue.
See also http://anbarrockny.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment