THAT'S JUST A BONUS, NOT THE SALARY.

          Trying to grasp the extent of the wealth that we produce to give to the army of parasites that feed of our backs is difficult. We tend to live in the real world of wages that keep you scurring back to work to pay next months bills. While sums of money that look like your mates phone number just don't register properly and are impossible to imagine dropping into your bank account on a regular basis. Staying with Think Left, this article helps put it into some perspective.

Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester has agreed to waive his bonusof approaching £1million after the Labour Party threatened to call a parliamentary debate on the issue.

“these men can afford to refuse what the rest of us would consider a fortune”

       This follows close on the heels of the RBS chairman, Sir Philip Hampton’s, decision to refuse his own bonus of £1.4million. As a measure of wealth these figures are pretty striking. They are bonuses not pay. Mr Heston still stands to pocket in the region of £39million during his time with RBS.

       Apparently these men can afford to refuse what the rest of us would consider a fortune. To put it into perspective, if you were to put £1.4million into a savings account at 5% interest, this would earn you £70,000 a year.

Continue reading:

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AL CAPONE STYLE BONUSES!!

      We keep hearing rumblings from our shiny politicians about regulating the banks and curtailing those monopoly money bonuses. But I wouldn't hold my breath on anything actually happening, afte all most of the politicians have friends in that little racket, all the patter is for public consumption only. It is difficult to find on what criteria the bankers base their right to those obscene bonuses. They can't justify their bonus claim on hard work. If it was hard work that merited those staggering bonuses, then I would probably be a very rich man. Not because of my hard work, but that of my father, he was a coal miner all his working life. The pits used to close for the Glasgow Fair fortnight, but they always needed a skeleton crew to go down the pit every day to check for gas and/or flooding etc. So he volunteered for that year after year. My mother and her wee gang would head off to Dunoon for our two weeks holiday, my father never came, we saw him at the weekends. Now that is hard work, so if stratospheric bonuses were based on hard work my dad would have been a millionaire, and no doubt, me being his only son, would have benefited very nicely after his death, however, I'm just one of the nations poor pensioners. So we can discount the hard work theory for big bonuses. Perhaps it is based on the amount of money you generate, they could believe that the more money you generate, the bigger your bonus. So the less money you generate the less of a bonus you get. Of course if we carry this to its natural conclusion, if you don't generate money then you are in trouble. Meaning that people like surgeons etc. who go off to work every day, cutting and stitching people, don't generate any money. In fact they cost us money, should we then charge these people to work for us? Or should we base remuneration on a simple “fair days wage for a fair days work”, principle?

       The truth is that there is no justification for those ridiculous, mind-blowing bonuses, it is just the simple law of gangsterism. Just as in the Al Capone days, the mobsters looked after “their boys”, so that they could rely on them to do their dirty work and protect them and their wealth creating racket. So the financial Mafia of today, look after “their boys”, so that they can rely on them to do their dirty work and protect them and their wealth creating racket. It is not in the remit of the financial Mafia and “their boys” to do anything for the community at large, it is simple to gather as much wealth and power into their particular section of the rackets.

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ONE DIMENSIONAL ELITIST RESPONSE.

      

      As the political class make their usual one dimensional responses to the events in England of the last fews days, it is good to be able to read something with a little more depth. I always maintain that our over lords and masters, the political and corporate class, know nothing of the society that you and I  inhabit. Our millionaire elitists that sit and pontificate in marble halls, somehow believe that they know the answers to our problems when in fact they don't even know the problems. They are in fact the biggest part of our problems. They enforce a system that creates inequality, and continually widens that gap. They legislate to protect their wealth and privileges and when people object to this unjust, immoral situation, they jump up and shout "crimminality" "thug" "full force of the law" and other meaningless crap.  Those who are shouting loudest are part of a band that fiddled their expenses, get into bed with bankers that laughingly take tax payers money and then pay themselves bonuses that to the ordinary guy, are monopoly money figures. What is more they don't understand why when they talk of respect, most people just get angry.

      The following is a short extract from an article on Libcom and is well worth a read. 

Writer and poet William Wall explores the link between neoliberalism and the UK riots.

            One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the context of the present rioting in London is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more generously ‘disaffected youth’. All the talk from Cameron and his cohorts is of crime and punishment and ‘the full force of the law’ - as if these young people did not encounter the full force of the law on a daily basis. We are told variously that there is no political context, no political motive, no political enemy – it is ‘criminality pure and simple’. This is because violence against the police (and therefore the state) is not considered in itself to be political. It is because the envy of, the desire for and the acquisition of luxury goods such as plasma TVs and jewellery is not considered political. The political class and the commentariat cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of the people who live in areas like Tottenham where Tory cuts are closing youth centres, which suffer massive unemployment even while the City is booming, and which are the objects of legislation designed to disadvantage them even further.

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THE BROADEST SHOULDERS!!!

“it's fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load” (David Cameron, justifying the cuts, Conservative party conference 6 Oct 2010)

'The Broadest Shoulders?'
By Camcorder Guerillas - Scotland 2011 - 4 mins.

They gambled an' lost, an' we've to pay??

         How cuts in benefits will affect disabled people “we are not cheats… we are not scroungers… it’s us who need supporting not the banks” In October 2010 the coalition Government announced public sector cuts of £81 billion, including £18 billion cuts to benefits. Whilst the rich avoid £120 billion of taxes and bankers continue to award themselves huge bonuses, “disabled people are facing the biggest attack on their rights since the 1930s”.

Join us in speaking out against the cuts.

        Share the film with others, Post the film to your facebook, twitter or myspace site. Click on the “Share” Icon. More info on how to share the film vimeo.com/​275807
        Embed the film in your website or blog. Click on the “Embed” icon. More info on how to embed the film vimeo.com/​help/​faq#what_is_embedding

      Distribute our poster at your workplace, college, union and neighbourhood. Get in touch info@camcorderguerillas.net to discuss organising a screening event.

          

The Broadest Shoulders? from Camcorder Guerillas on Vimeo.

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RICH SCROUNGERS, EVERY ONE OF THEM.

        The Disability Living Allowance claimants who are having to go through the process of re-assessment are having to face a much flawed system. As far as I am aware, Atos the company responsible for the assessments, does not require staff to have any training in or understanding of mental illness. And as anybody who has any knowledge of mental illness is aware, the condition can vary considerably from day to day. So it is difficult to understand how a one of, one day visit can adequately assess someone as fit for work. Of course the very fact that you are facing a short one of meeting that could affect the rest of your life, only adds stress and can aggravate the condition. There are lots of people on Disability Living Allowance who have physical conditions that fluctuate wildly from one day feeling not too bad, to other days when they are completely incapacitated. How does a short meeting assess this accurately? The Guardian has an excellent article on this subject HERE.

          The whole philosophy behind this unfair, stressful re-assessment system is based on an ideology that all those on benefit are scroungers, and the self righteous pampered millionaire parasites, that is our government, is intent on weeding them out. Who are the scroungers? Those pampered millionaires who have grown up in a cloistered world of unearned wealth and excess, or those on benefit struggling day to day to make ends meet? I have no doubt that a few do work the system and get a meagre living out of it, but the vast majority by far are legitimate claims and those on benefits do not lead a life of luxury, they struggle from day to day. Compare this with the abuse of the system by the over paid MPs with their expenses fiddles, those massive fat bonuses paid to grossly over paid bankers, the abuse of the system by the tax dodging corporations, and the millionaires with their wealth tucked away in some tax haven while prancing about in this country giving advice to their millionaire friends in government.

        This attack on those on benefit is an attack on the working class and they should not have to face it alone. On benefit or not, we have to stand side by side with those who are on benefits. These benefit cuts are only one aspect of a general attack on our class by the pampered parasite class. Deficit my arse, it is all about privatising everything and grabbing public assets into private hands.

 

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REWARD THE THIEVES!!!

       As we struggle through our daily grind most seem not to be fully aware of the impact of the cuts being implemented by the public school millionaire thugs. Aware or unaware we can be sure the results will be somewhere between horrendous and apocalyptic, with the public sector employees taking the brunt of this assault, though all the ordinary people will feel the pain.

       All the debate on the media is about how to cut, where to cut and by how much to cut. Nobody is talking about cause, blame, pay-back. The so called “financial collapse”, was predictable and was caused by the greed of the financial centre as they blew a great big housing bubble and aided and abetted by government and bankers gorged on it until it burst. The rewarded themselves, by grabbing massive slices of the mortgage revenue in the form of absurdly large salaries, loan shark commissions and those stratospheric “performance bonuses”. When the pot went dry and their scam collapsed they simple held out the begging bowl and the government, with tax payers money, duly obliged. Groups of individuals were culpable and gained immensely from their greed, but who is being held to account? Nobody, it is expected that the ordinary individual will take the hit, so as to protect the lavish lifestyles of the perpetrators of this giant scam. The very fabric of our society will be shredded, unemployment will soar, what savings the ordinary person thought they had in the value of their home will drop dramatically. Meanwhile the financial Mafia will continue to laugh all the way to the bank. The ordinary people of this country did not cause the “collapse” (mess) they are the victims, but then again, this is capitalism, and that is the way that the system is meant to work. You work all your life, they live off your back. Get used to it, or change it forever.

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POOR LIVID BANKERS!!!

        

       The government has put on a wee publicity stunt, it has increased the bank levy from £1.7bln. to £2.5bln. and guess what, the bank bosses are livid. Rightly so, doesn't this government realise that the deficit has nothing to do with the banks, that's the tax payers responsibility. As far as the financial world is concerned it is up to the ordinary people to pay for the deficit and let them get on with ripping-off everybody and anybody, while paying themselves massive bonuses. As far as the amount of the bank levy, it can be put in proportion when it is compared to what the bank bonuses are expected reach. It looks like the poor hard done by bankers will have to get by with a mere £6 billion bonus pot this year. Tax the bankers a fraction of what they should be paying and they squeal and jump up and down doing their livid thing. Slash the standard of living for the vast majority of the population and the financial parasites proclaim that the government is on the right track. Makes you think, doesn't it, well it should.

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MARCH FOR THE ALTERNATIVE.

      The alternative being a society based on mutual aid that sees to the needs of all those in that society, a society freed from the profit motive and founded on sustainability.
    The planned government spending cuts will decimate public services and put more than 1 million out of work. They will hit the most vulnerable, damage communities and undermine much that holds us together as a society. By raising £4 through cuts to every pound raised through tax, most of this through VAT, which hits the poorest and those on middle incomes hardest, is nothing short of class war. This recession was a product of the finance sector, yet the banks and the parasites responsible are now enjoying massive bonuses, and not being asked to make their fair contribution, but then again, that's capitalism.

The TUC has organised a demonstration for the 26th March in London, if you value our social services, do your damnedest to be there to show your anger. Of course we should not be marching to ask for a better deal from our lords and masters, the parasitical millionaires. We should be marching to bring about the alternative to this corporate greed feast and change society forever in our favour, bringing down this unfair, exploitative system of profit before people. See your local TUC for travel arrangements, organise your own arrangements with your own group, pensioners, students, public sector workers, unemployed, etc. help make this the biggest demonstration of public anger that this country has ever seen. If however you can't make it down to London you should be organising a similar type of demonstration in your local area. Glaswegians should be heading to George Square to put their anger on display for all to see. If you will not be at any of the demonstrations, at least take the day off.

       We cannot stand by and be plundered by the corporate world, aided and abetted by the millionaire public school thugs at the Westminster House of Hypocrisy and Corruption. Make no mistake, this decimation of our welfare system to protect the parasites that inhabit the bond markets is class war. They will continue to plunder all our public assets, driving us back to Victorian poverty, until we put a halt to this unfair system of greed.

Pledge your support here-  
 
   We have almost a couple of months to swell the numbers beyond anything ever seen before in Britain 

 
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