Showing posts with label working poor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working poor. Show all posts

Tuesday 3 October 2023

Work Hard???

 

                                                   Image courtesy of Blogs.Iris.

          In Scotland there is a saying "wha's like is" in my opinion not that many in the developed world. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation research reveals that in this oil and whisky country, almost half a million individuals are living in "very deep poverty", an increase of 300,000 since last March. They also found that poverty among working people was growing and 10% of employees were locked into persistent low pay. Those worst hit by this capitalist created poverty are women and ethnic minorities. Following the capitalist work ethic that work lifts you our of poverty, is another spewing of bullshit, as 60% of children living in poverty have at least one parent working. Compare this with those parasites at the other end of wealth scale. Anders Holch Povlsen, who is the owner of Danish retailer Bestseller and has a 25 per cent stake in ASOS, he has managed to grasp a personal fortune of £6.5billion, which is up by £500million compared to last year. Not bad for a 49 year old. Then we have the Easdale brothers, James and Sandy with a £1.363billion fortune based on transport and property acquisitions. Let's not forget the  Edinburgh lassie JK Rowling, she added £30million to her fortune, making her worth £850 million.

        Now do you think any of these and other millionaire parasites, work that much harder than factory workers, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, nurses, and those in a host of essential jobs that keep this country going and create that wealth that these parasites plunder? Think about it, we create all that wealth, why can't we share it among all our people?

Visit ann arky at https://spiritofrevolt.info   

Friday 20 December 2019

The Hungry Keep Feeding Capitalism.


       Surely if in the richest capitalist country on the planet there are millions of the population going hungry, it should be blatantly obvious that the capitalist system doesn't work for the people. Country after country sees continuing and rising poverty and homelessness, and still we are sold the myth that capitalism is the best economic system for this planet. Do we honestly believe that this system of inequality and injustice and growing poverty and hunger is the best that the human mind can come up with? Ask anybody if they can think of a better way of distributing the wealth that we create and I'm sure they will come up with an answer, but we put that aside and accept the lies and illusions spun by the rich and powerful parasite class. Why?
This from Global Research: 


      In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera (1), in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called Hunger in America, in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements.
      When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; today there are more than 40,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of four. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing. A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.
     That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving” – looking in garbage bins for edible food.
      In 2013, America’s largest food bank in New York City delivered more than 35 million Kgs of food, and still 1.5 million of the city’s 8 million inhabitants are hungry. After that CBS documentary and prior to Reagan’s appearance, New York had almost no need for emergency food services, and had only 28 food agencies. Today that number is more than 1,000. The problem is so serious that many agencies fear that desperation for food will lead to increasing violence.
     By contrast, only about 5% of Chinese said there had been times during the previous 12 months when they had been hungry, while in the US that number is now 25% and still rising. Maura Daly, a social agency spokesperson said,
      “People have a lot of misimpressions about hunger in America. People think it’s associated with homelessness when, in fact, it is working families, it’s kids, it’s the disabled.”
        Perhaps even more alarming was the release of study data in the middle of 2014 documenting that 25% of the US military members are also dependent on food stamps, food banks and other civilian welfare projects for their survival. After compiling four years of data, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity, released its largest and most comprehensive study which showed, among other things that 15% of all Americans rely on food banks for all their basic nutrition. In other words, no other source of food. But perhaps the most shocking revelation was that 25% of military personnel were in the same financial position. Of course, the Pentagon was quick to take issue with the study’s methodology, using statistical babble to cloak their embarrassment.
       Across the other side of the planet, India, another super rich capitalist country, there is an army of hungry mouths while the wealth piles up in the bank accounts of the few.