WHERE TO PLACE YOUR BETS???

      

        For more than a month there have been large protests in a Middle Eastern country and there has been some brutal repression of those protesters taking place. The figures we are give is 16 killed and 130 wounded. The protesters are calling for greater democracy, an end to corruption and better services. The powers that be, are labelling the protesters as having links to Al-Qaeda, just as Gaddafi is saying about the Libyan protesters, The protesters claim no such link, and state that they are ordinary people wanting an end to their poverty, an end to mass unemployment, government corruption and are seeking better services in their communities.

     

        However, our two knights in shining armour for democracy, Obama and Cameron are not in this case, backing the protesters and calling for the leader to step down and accept the will of the people. They remain silent about the protests and offer no criticism of the leader and his coterie. The reason being that the protests are taking place in Iraq. This is the country that is meant to be the shining example of the West building democracy in the Arab world. We bombed the country back to the stone age and killed hundreds of thousands of its people, so that we could bring them democracy and Mr. Nuri al-Maliki is our man in the driving seat.

       

         It must be extremely difficult for this bunch of hypocrites to try to keep up with when to support their favourite dictator and when to dump him in favour of their favourite people's uprising. Dictators are embraced when it is good for business and we have access to their resources, but are dumped when it looks like being their friend will damage our business interests. In this corporate value structure, dictators and the people are expendable, the main criteria is profit for the corporate world. We in the West should be following our Arab friends and en masse be calling a halt to the corruption that festers throughout this type of society. Change may be sweeping through the Middle East but it will continue to be a corrupt system if it continues to do business with the corrupt and hypocritical West.

ann arky's home.

THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE OUT.

      Ian Duncan Smith's new super plan to penalise the unemployed is now about to be rolled out. It's modelled on that righteous authoritarian dictate, “three strikes and you're out”. Your crimes could one or all of the following dreadful crimes, refusing to take a job offered by your “Job Seeker Advisor”, failing to apply for a job when told to do so, failing to turn up for a placement interview.

      For the first offence you could lose three months Job Seekers Allowance, a second offence and it is six months lose of JSA, and wait for it, a third offence and you lose your JSA for three YEARS. Another little bit of their authoritarian mind set is that you have no right of appeal, your Job Seeker Advisor's word is final.

      This type of planing chooses to ignore the fact that there are 500,000 listed vacancies in this country while there are over 2.5 million unemployed. It also chooses to ignore that with their policies of cuts, we are going to see another 500.000 public sector workers dumped on the unemployment queue, plus the knock-on effect in the private sector.

      A Job Seeker Advisor will be able to strip “errant” unemployed of their JSA with no right of appeal, and no doubt the Advisor will be under pressure to meet targets. Cameron's millionaire poodle, Clegg says that the plans will bring 300,000 households back into work. Even assuming his figures are anyway near accurate, what he fails to mention is that figure will be more than replaced by the public sector pay-offs.

     There are thousands of reasons why people become unemployed, the biggest one is lack of decent jobs, nothing in the millionaire's plans go any way to solving that problem. Forcing people to go about picking up litter 30 hours a week for no pay does not create jobs. It could of course reduce paid employment as councils struggling to cut cost now find that they can have the streets cleaned for free, will start to pay off those who are paid to do this work.

     All of these plans are driven by an ideology, there is nothing wrong with the capitalist model, your poor because of you own lack of effort, the unemployed are lazy shirkers and if you are not working you deserve nothing. This is the type of society they are intent on forcing on the people of this country, there is no room for sharing, helping those less fortunate than ourselves, services based on needs. Everything must create a profit for the millionaire class and that profit as usual will come from the working class, who will have no say in how our society is run. Our lords and masters will be the corporate world, it is not a pretty picture if you are a member of the working class. Only by realising this is a class war, and at the moment we are loosing, can we hope to reverse this trend and push society in the direction of an all inclusive sharing society where needs over ride profit and mutual aid is the basic principle.

ann arky's home.