Showing posts with label riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label riots. Show all posts

Wednesday 17 August 2011

FASCISM OR DEMOCRACY??



          What kind of democracy is it when the government minsters influence the courts sentencing policy along ideological lines? I thought that in a democracy the judiciary was meant to be independent and sentencing proportional. What we have in this country is the Prime Minister and some of his millionaire chums in the cabinet calling for sentences away out of all proportion to the actual crime committed, just so they can appeal to their fascist backwoods support and brandish their “tough-on-crime credentials. Four years prison for two young men who put a page on Facebook, is the usual, we will make an example of these young men and scare the shit out of all the other young people. In my book, that has no resemblance to justice. Throwing families out of their home because one member of that family has committed a crime, hardly fair, hardly proportional, and certainly not justice. We can be sure that our right-wing millionaire fascists will use the disturbances and whatever else they can, to further their agenda, more control over the ordinary people, tougher policing in the poorer communities, whole areas to be under curfew, and we will be told, it is all for our own good. No talk of sharing the wealth of this very rich country more equally, no talk of alleviating the poverty and deprivation in some of our communities. No, it will be more control and a tighter grip on what will become ghettos. In capitalism when there are no jobs and they are going through one of their frequent crisis, the people become a bit of a nuisance, so have to be contained so as to allow the better off to get on with their consumerism and the corporate world to get on with its looting and plundering. If we wish to have democracy, we have to get rid of the state and its bed partner, the corporate world. In this modern capitalist world, the state and the corporate world are one, they have merged into one body that has set out to control the world for the gain of the shareholders and the financial sector, it is called corporatism, Mussolini’s name for fascism.

Monday 15 August 2011

ONE LAW FOR THE RICH - ONE FOR THE POOR.

            

 In the Jon Snow blog he refers to  a sense of one law for the poor and one law for the rich. If you live in one of the poorer areas this will be blindingly obvious to you, but if you are one of that bunch of privileged parasites that make up our political class and the corporate world, you will be unaware of that. You will expect the law to protect your haul and the means by which you procured your loot. You will expect the law to keep the riffraff well away from your locality and from your little empire. You will expect it to keep the place safe for you to continue your looting career. Many of the cheating MPs, when found out, simply handed back what they had stolen and that was that, will the individuals that took part in the riots be given the option of handing back what they have stolen and that will be that???  SNOWBLOG is worth a wee read.


            There is a sense in Britain too of a widening gap in both wealth and law – that there is a that there is one law for the elite and one for the poor. Take the MPs’ and Peers’ expenses scandal. A tiny handful of the expenses abusers have gone to jail. The vast majority have been allowed to pay stuff back or retreat to the political undergrowth. How many of the looters will be allowed to bring their plasma screens and running shoes back in return for their freedom? And yet it is the very unpunished abuse of the state by its elected and unelected elite which many argue is part of the landscape that the recent riots played out across.
             We are told thousands of rioters and looters have been arrested. Hundreds have been charged, some have already been punished – many cases are still in train.
Many have pointed to the reality that an even smaller handful of bankers have faced the law even than those politicians who have been prosecuted. No British banker is in jail for what happened in 2008. And as financial upheaval cascades before us all over again, almost no serious measures have been taken to stop the same people from doing it to the people all over again.