Austerity, The Success Story.

        So austerity is working, it is doing what it was intended to do, reduce the UK to a sweatshop economy. The corporate boardrooms are rubbing its hands with greedy glee. According to a report just recently published by the TUC, between 2007 and 2015, in the UK, real wages fell by 10.4%. A massive bonus to directors and shareholders. hooray for austerity.
        This decline in real wages puts the UK at the bottom of the league of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operaration and Development) as far as I am aware there are 29 countries across the globe who are members of this organisation. The report also found that during the same period, real wages grew by varying amounts through the OECD, in Poland real wages increased by 23%, in Germany 14%, France 11%, and on average, across the whole of the OECD, real wages increased by 6.7%. 

       We here in the UK, thanks to “austerity”, have suffered the largest fall in real wages of any advanced country other than Greece. In fact in the OECD, Greece, Portugal and the UK were the only three countries where real wages fell. Yet to listen to the bullshit spewing from the mouths of government ministers, you would think that we lived in Utopia.
       Of course we would be naive if we thought that this trend was likely to change any day soon. It is all going in the right direction, the falling pound, combined with cheaper labour, means we can compete with the other sweatshops of the world, enhancing the profits of the corporate bodies. Across the boardrooms of the UK they are working hard at persuading the powers that be to keeping this wonderful austerity plan going. 

         We the British public paid dearly to help the bankers out of their greed fest, no doubt our lords and masters will be planning for us to help UK industry and services out of any Brexit problems that might arise. Oh when will we ever learn?

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You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.

 

        I have always stated that the "austerity" policy has nothing to do with "balancing the books", "debt reduction" or the "financial crisis", it's all about creating sweatshop conditions here in the West, so that our imperialist masters can compete with their rivals in the East. Austerity will be a permanent feature of our future society, it is all ideology, and we are mere units in their productivity plan, units that they can manipulate to reduce the cost. It is unbelievable that vast swaths of people still think that Oxbridge millionaires are the best people to look after the welfare of the poor. That people who grow their wealth and power by investing in large corporations, will in some way help the poor to better wages and conditions, it's an absurd line of thought, our interests are in opposition to their interests. 

      The system is controlled by corporate wealth, with one aim, to grow corporate wealth, and you and I, with our demand for a decent life, stand in the way. No matter what hardship you may think you have been hit by, because of this ideology, you ain't seen nothin' yet, think Greece. The average salary in Greece is now down to £17,000 per annum, that was their first experiment, and it worked, now to roll it out across Europe.

      An extract from an excellent article in The Guardian:

--------Now add in these: disability living allowance starts converting into personal independence payment with a target to remove 500,000 people in new Atos medical tests. The Guardian has revealed how jobcentre staff are under orders to find any sanction to knock people off benefits. New obstacles are strewn in their path: people must apply for their benefits online from computers they don't possess; many of these claimants are semi-literate. When in dire straits, there will be no more crisis loans, only a card for buying food, with not a penny for bus fares. Trussell Trust food banks expect a great surge of the hungry, so they ask everyone to donate the price of an Easter egg.
     Here is the final wicked twist: legal aid has been removed for advice on benefits, housing, divorce, debt, education and employment. On Monday the budget of Citizens Advice for such cases falls from £22m to £3m. The few emergency cases still covered – families facing instant eviction – can only use a phone service, not face-to-face legal help. Law centres will close. There will be no help on school exclusions, landlord or employer harassment, or failure to pay wages.--------

Read the full article HERE: 

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

On The Road To A Sweatshop Economy.

     Yesterday saw the launch of Iain Duncan Smith's, ( I. D. S. Idiot Dickhead Smith.) Help To Work scheme. The idea is to help 2.3 million unemployed into approximately 500,000 vacancies, that works out at approximately 5 people chasing every job, of course it varies from area to area. In high unemployment areas the figure is much worse. How is IDS going to shove those 2.3 million into those 500,000 vacancies? Well by forcing people to work for six months doing community work, for no wages, if they refuse, stop their jobseekers allowance for 4 weeks, and if the refuse again, then stop their allowance for 13 weeks, so it's deprivation, or work for nothing. Another of I D S's ideas is to get longterm unemployed to sign on every day, can you imagine the queues at job centres, or will he employ extra staff at the centres, that might help bring done unemployment.

     If you are sentenced by a court for an offence, say assault, the maximum community service you would do, would be 300 hours, but those unemployed will be forced to do more than twice this, 780 hours. Obviously in this society, to be unemployed is worse than assaulting somebody.

        Whichever measure is used, there are nowhere near enough vacancies to enable everyone currently looking for a job to find one. Of course that doesn't matter, the idea is to get people used to working for nothing, then they might be extremely grateful when they are offered a crap job with crap wages. It is all part of the plan to create a sweatshop UK. The UK corporate bosses love Idiot Dickhead Smith.

        The fact that they have launched their “Flagship” policy, doesn't mean that it will work, as usual it will be ill thought out, ill prepared, under funded, under manned, and result in chaos, as well as heaping stress on enormous numbers of people. From ATOS, to Workfare, to the bedroom tax, to Help To Work, it is all about co-ercing people to accept the unacceptable, a low wage economy, and big bucks for employers.

        It seems that the lauch has, as predicted, has seen chaos on its first day. This from The Void: 

       Despite wildly optimistic claims from the DWP, today’s launch of mass workfare seems to be in chaos behind the scenes.  With barely any information yet available on the scheme it appears that the flagship Help To Work programme has no-one actually running it, no guidance for companies involved and no real plan to deal with the huge influx of claimants to Jobcentres from daily signing.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Their Growth Is Our Deprivation.

      Where do we stand as a country, our lords and masters, the millionaire class, spout growth and being a world leader. What is more, they come up with mythical figures to prove their illusion. Of course you and I, the people on the ground, outside that bubble of rarefied atmosphere of upper crust parasites, see it somewhat different. While they discus figures plucked from their favourite guess-machine, and Her Majesty's Opposition produce imperceptible variations on those figures, we, the ordinary Joe, live in the real world of food banks and workfare, of choosing between heating or eating. In our world we are acutely aware of our collapsing infrastructure and our rapidly descending standard of living. We might have smart-phones, tablets and super broadband, but large swathes of our elderly and vulnerable are facing problems from hypothermia, and malnutrition has double in the last year. We the ordinary people are also well aware of the fact that we live with an eduction system that miserably fails our kids. According to a recent report, South Korean, Vietnamese and Macanese teenagers are streets ahead of our teenagers, in mathematics and science.
      Our infrastructure is late nineteenth century early twentieth century, and as we would expect our industrial over lords never invest, but are merely interested in taking the profits and running things into the ground, out-sourcing is cheaper, so more profitable. According to a recent survey of 148 countries by the World Economic Forum, our road transport system was rated as inferior to that of Barbados and our roads were ranked worse than those of Chile.
       Of course we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, as far as our standard of living is concerned, it is all going to plan. Our millionaire political class, (who we should not forget, are all big investors in, and friends of, the corporate greed machine) are working hard with their corporate masters, to get this country down to a low wage, sweatshop economy, and you have to say, aren't they doing well.
     A cheap subservient workforce is the key to their growth, their businesses will grow in size and profitability. They will be able to compete with their Easter competitors. So when you hear the corrupt millionaire political cabal, and the greed driven parasitic corporate greed machine, talk of growth, you know what they mean, it's growth in their bank accounts that they are after, and you and I, are the tools.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Britain's Slave Labour Force.

     What do you call a society that has thousands of people forced to work without any salary, for the benefit of the rich? Remember the Romans with their slaves, then in the not too distant past we had the imperial slave trade that built empires by taking hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people from Africa and using them as unpaid beasts of burden across Europe and America. Well that's all in the past now, or is it?

      According to the latest Labour Market Statistics, here in the UK we have 168,000 people being forced to work for no salary, a jump of 8,000 since last year. This also chops 168,000 off the unemployed list, more dodgy accounting. As in the past, these slaves are building empires, they are benefiting the rich. These slaves are friends and family of people like you and I, they are ordinary folks, who are being used by this system to undermine the wages and conditions of us all. Our lords and masters, the Oxbridge millionaire cabal, in The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, call it “workfare”, we should call it by its real name, modern day slavery. This is not just an attack on the unemployed, it is an attack on all our wages and conditions, it is an attempt to force our conditions low enough to compete with the eastern sweatshops, to create a European sweatshop economy that will give the financial Mafia a better return on their ill-gotten plunder. It is not a civilised society that forces people to work for nothing, leaving them in poverty, while their efforts benefit those with unimaginable wealth. 

      We live in a country under a system that hasn't enough jobs for everybody and punishes those who are unemployed. I say “not enough jobs”, not that, there isn't enough to do to improve our society. In a socially organised society we would utilise everybody's efforts for the common good, we would all gain from each others efforts and nobody would be superfluous to requirements, as in this society. As long as profit is the aim, people will be exploited, used and abused, the wellbeing of the people and profit for the few are two completely incompatible aims.

       The list of companies and charities that have or are using “workfare” is like an A to Z phone directory. All of these companies should be boycotted, picketed, and publicly shamed. As long as they can pull in free labour, they will refrain from looking for new paid employees, they will cut the hours of existing employees, and so the downward spiral of our conditions continue. The system isn't broken, it was built this way, it's how capitalism works. 
Useful sites:

Wikipedia's A-Z of UK slave users. 
Boycott workfare.
The Void.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglagsow.me.uk

Bullshit Economics.

      Well they came in swing their hatchet, cut, cut, cut, pain is necessary to get “the economy” going again. Of course the cuts and the pain were not for them, no, that part was for you and I the ordinary people. Millionaire Osborne, took the economic reins two and a half years ago with his pompous know-all statement that the UK's triple "A" credit rating was the hallmark of success and he would make sure we kept that rating. His next guarantee he made was his cut, slash and burn policies would lead to the UK deficit being reduced and the land would be covered by lovely green shoots. Well what a load of cobblers all that has been, the UK triple "A" rating has been downgraded by two of the three rating agencies and the figures out this week show public sector borrowing in March this year was £10.6 billion, up from £9.7 billion the previous March. So it looks like the first estimate of net borrowing in 2012/13 is similar to last year's £120 billion.

      Two and a half years of austerity, a nice way of saying poverty, heaped on a people for the prize of a deteriorating society. All the Cameron/Osborne bullshit exposed for what it is. I have never swallowed this crap about the “deficit reduction” would lead to growth, to the financial Mafia it was irrelevant whither it did or didn't. The plan was a little more multifaceted than that. “Deficit reduction” was plain and simple, a transferring of public wealth to the coffers of the financial Mafia to make up for their gambling losses, a way of legitimising the selling off all public assets to the corporate world, and of course to get wages down and create a UK sweatshop economy to compete with their Eastern sweatshop competitors. So it is working well at the moment.

     This is capitalism, all this chatter about deficit reduction, credit ratings and growth, is not with your welfare in mind, it's all about corporate profits, you and I are incidental to these calculations. We are an inconvenience to the corporate world, they need us to buy their crap, and sadly we need to be fed, and that means paying us, that in turn hits their profits. They will of course, always struggle to keep that cost down and they have this system of so called “representative democracy” which puts the stamp of legitimacy on policies to keep us in our place and to protect and enhance their profit margins. Until we change that system, we will continue to be screwed. They need us, we don't need them.

ann arky's home.

How To Increase Your Workforce Without Increasing Your Wage Bill.

         Are there any idiots out there who believe that Poundland and Homebase etc., take on unemployed people under the ConDem's workfare scheme simply to help them find a job? I have no doubt across the country's boardrooms the discussions will be around how many they can take on in an attempt to keep down their wage bill. It's great value, a subsidy from the government to their millionaire friends, free labour, slavery with the stamp of legitimacy.

      Continuous demonstrations against this modern day slave labour scheme have been responsible for some companies dropping out of this government gift scheme to their corporate buddies, they don't like the bad publicity, it could damage their profit margins, they want you the public to love them. More needs to be done to kill this scheme dead. However, Homebase have just blown away any illusions that were there, about this being for the benefit of the unemployed.

 Photo from Pride's Purge.

From The Guardian:

     Leaked internal document appears to promote the use of unpaid jobseekers to reduce company payroll costs. Homebase has been accused of "vulture" business practices after a leaked internal document appeared to promote the idea of using unpaid jobseekers to keep down company payroll costs. The DIY retailer confirmed that a photo of more than a dozen unemployed jobseekers from the government's work experience programme, captioned, "Would 750 hours with no payroll costs benefit YOUR store?" was produced by company staff for an internal discussion.

Of course you can forget all that crap about it being voluntary

Again from The Guardian:

     Jobseekers have been made to do compulsory unpaid work for up to four weeks after refusing to take part in the voluntary work experience scheme. The revelation, supported by documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, calls into question the concessions made to the voluntary programme last month, which removed a two-week benefit sanction imposed on those dropping out of that scheme, as refusal to complete a placement on the compulsory scheme can lead to jobseekers' benefits being stopped for three to six months.

     This is the grand plan, get wages down to sweatshop level, cut all social spending, (reduces big businesses tax bills) and then force those who can't find work into a job for no wages. That way our beloved corporate benefactors will be able to compete with all the other sweatshop economies across the globe. Who can possible object to that plan?

     Day by day it becomes more obvious that this greed driven system called capitalism has nothing to offer the ordinary people, we get screwed on a daily basis by well coiffured, shiny suited, (Boris Johnston excepted) millionaires. How they must laugh when at their sumptuous dinner parties, they sarcastically talk about austerity and us all being in this together. I can hear them in their mansions, giggle over cocktails as they joke about the "bedroom tax". I can imagine the conversation in their posh clubs, as they discuss how many employees they can take on-board without paying them a penny in wages. Are we waiting to see if they will change and perhaps share their cake with us? We'll have a long wait.

ann arky's home.

We Are Half Way There!!

       I keep mouthing off about the financial Mafia driving us back to the deprivation of the Victorian era in their attempt at creating a European sweatshop economy, well we are half way there. The figures from a newly published study from the High Pay Centre makes for some interesting reading. Its conclusions are that the UK has returned to the pay inequalities that have not been seen since the 1930's. While we, the ordinary people have seen our incomes shrivel, the top 1% have seen their share of the national income more than double since 1979, they now claim 14.5% of the national income. The national average wage in the UK sits at £20,500, while the 26,000 top earning parasites of this country receive more than that in a month after tax, taking home a tidy sum of at least £21,500 a month. Of course average earnings can be misleading, we have approximately 6.75 million people in the UK earning less than £800 a month. Think of the difference in your standard of living, £800 a month or £21,500 a month, how do you justify that disparity?

     At least one rich retired business man doesn't seem to like this. The Independent on Sunday reported that a certain Sir Mike Darrington, retired CEO of Greggs, has written to the remuneration boards of all the FTSE 100 companies begging them to show restraint on executive pay, no this is not a joke. Strange that he should write this letter AFTER he retired and not before. However I wouldn't hold my breath on a positive response from his FTSE 100 colleagues.

     Of course it is not just in Europe that this great divide is ever widening, in the US they have the same pattern, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In that land of the free and opportunity, for the year 2009, a mere 311 Americans shared between them a staggering $54 trillion, while 80% of the American population share just 7% of the national wealth. As for the bottom 40%, well they get by with barely any wealth at all. Ah well, that's capitalism for you.

      If we want to change this, and what ordinary sane person wouldn't, we will have to take a very different approach from our Sir Mike Darrington, It is no use appealing to the charity of a bunch of greedy parasites, we have to get rid of them. Would the chickens ask the fox to help them?

ann arky's home.

Austerity = Sweatshop Economy.

       I've said it, you've said it, it's about time everybody said it and acted on it. Austerity is about creating sweatshop conditions, it's about robbing the public purse and handing that wealth to the financial Mafia. All the chatter on that babbling brook of bullshit, the media, by "economic experts", is smoke and mirrors, it's gobbly-gook and should be classified as economic bullshit, it's a charade for your benefit, to keep you ignorant and subdued, while the financial parasites suck you dry. We are being bled to death by deliberate policies, adhering to a strict ideology. Austerity kills, but only the ordinary people, millionaires don't notice austerity, they're doing just fine.

ann arky's home.

WHOSE RIGHT DIRECTION?

       David Cameron in his new year speech has said that Britain “is heading in the right direction”, and he really means it. As far as our millionaire parasite Prime Minister and his millionaire corporate cronies are concerned, we are “moving in the right direction”. Two years of shrinking incomes due to wage freezes/cuts and wage increases of less than inflation, have taken the country nearer to that corporate dream of a low wage sweatshop economy. It is all falling into place, low wages, part-time workers desperate to hold onto their carp job, temporary contracts that can be cancelled at a moments notice and a massive erosion of workers rights and entitlements. A few more years of this and our corporate masters will be able to compete with any sweatshop in the East. Their other success story is of course the cuts in social spending. To the corporate greed merchants, social spending is tax money, if we can get rid of all that mamby-pamby social spending nonsense, it would mean a reduction in taxes and therefore, an increase in their profits. In their philosophy of greed and exploitation, if people want services of any kind, social or otherwise, they can purchase them from the corporate world. Of course if you can't afford that, well, tough, that's not their problem.

     Yes Mr Cameron, you can hold your head up high among your millionaire corporate cronies, you have been successful in taking the people of this country well down the path of transformation from workers to serfs. However, if I were you, I would not get too confident and complacent, I do expect the people of this country will start to stand up and do to you, what you have done to them, and kick the shit out of you, and those millionaire corporate cronies. We will not quietly crawl into serfdom, we have been there before. 

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