A letter a day to number 10. No 1,173
Sunday 09 August 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Three myths that you Tories love to peddle: The rich are the entrepreneurial drivers of progress, privatisation offers more choice and better service and the trickle down effect.
The great capitalist dream is over, bar the screaming, that is. Edward Bernays’ (who turned propaganda into PR and was the great prostitute of capitalism) torches of freedom turned out to be cancer sticks and ashes. Let’s not confuse entrepreneurs with inventors and blue sky thinkers, the people who have driven progress through invention and daring, often at great personal cost, or confuse extreme wealth with social progress.
The famous Wright brothers apparently cared little for money but were passionate inventors, leading us into the skies, and today we owe the incredible power of the Internet to Tim Berners-Lee who gifted the World Wide Web to the world for free.
The Industrial Revolution onwards saw people hungry (literally) for jobs but let’s stop the silly myth that it is they who should be grateful to the wealthy, the capitalists and the corporations. Loyal workers and hard working people built the modern world but were rewarded with low wages and punishing hours, until labour got its act together and through bitter struggle wrestled an improved lot from those who siphoned all the profits of labour into their own pockets, as they still do today. The loyalties of corporations to workers can be seen today in the apocalyptic wasteland of Detroit, once the automobile capital of the world, now abandoned by the capitalists, who fed on its inhabitants and left them empty handed, for richer pastures elsewhere.
But we need not look so far afield. In Britain you are making work pay alright, you, Osborne and Smith are driving people into poverty and death to feed the markets voracious appetite for profit. Osborne is busily asset stripping the state, privatising our public services and the NHS, to serve the greedy who cherry pick services and abandon the unprofitable and time consuming treatments for the bottom line, profit. Corporate theft includes not just exploiting the workforce but also evading and avoiding taxes that pay for the very infrastructure they abuse and Osborne protects them just as he attempted (and failed) to protect bankers (the architects of the crash) bonuses in the European Court of Justice at public expense.
The dream of capitalism turned out to be a nightmare and Britain will not recover until we re-establish public, not for profit, ownership of all that has been stolen from us. As always this won’t come from the top, it will come through the eternal struggle of ordinary people for a fair deal and a fair share of the Earth and its resources which exist for our common benefit and which need husbanding not raping to feed naked greed. We must have Co-operation and co-operatives not corporations. This not a choice, it is a necessity because capitalism is destroying, and will destroy, the world. That is the economic and the living truth, unlike your economy of truth. There is no other route for humanity than to end this insanity.
Farmer’s Son Becomes the Great Inventor Who Created Computer Chips
http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Wright_Story_Intro/Wright_Story_Intro.htm
Detroit: One Of Our Greatest Cities Has Become A Desolate Wasteland Where The Lawless Reign
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/asset-stripping-bankrupt-britain.html
Cameron and Osborne did the Swiss tax deal to support tax evasion – there’s no other explanation
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/20/george-osborne-banker-bonuses_n_6190276.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-p-hoffa/global-capitalism-is-dest_b_858517.html
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 