The system is broken, and by that I do not mean accidentally, oops how careless of me, broken, I mean wilfully and deliberately broken.
I have lived my life with mental ill health and what I described as ‘social phobia’ years before any such description existed. Doctors told me I was agoraphobic, which then and now I refuse to accept, I am not afraid of open spaces, of the great outdoors, I am afraid of our system of inhuman society. What my mind and body has been telling me from a very young age was that there was and is something wrong with human society. I am not sick, or mentally deficient, my mind and body were accurately responding to a system that was and is exploitative and broken.
It is broken for many, if not most, ordinary people by design.
We are dangled a carrot of work for rewards which are inadequate to our needs. No matter how hard I worked, I had no control over the system that ‘rewards’ that work and so have spent most of my life living hand to mouth, and if something went wrong which required more money than I had available to fix it, I had no way to generate the necessary income to meet the need, other than by going into debt.
In the systems terms that is quite reasonable, and yet it is indisputably true that each of us is capable of creating more than we need to meet our own requirements, how else do companies profit from us? If the planet Earth were not capable of meeting all our needs, we simply would not be here. Forget evolution, if the abundance of resources are not there to sustain life then life does not survive. Had we husbanded the Earth well and wisely we would not now be facing the human made crises which threaten our future and life on planet Earth.
In Britain, one of the most fertile land areas on Earth, wealthy landowners are paid fortunes in subsidies not to produce anything of common usefulness from the land they own and the government will do everything it can to ensure that such subsidies continue after Brexit, as a matter of priority.
If you believe the world is overcrowded and we cannot feed the world, ask yourself how you know that? Where did you learn that from? If all the world’s population was gathered side by side, each taking up a square metre of land, we would occupy a space of 7,200 square kilometres, that’s over ten times smaller than Ireland at 84,421 square kilometres. It is estimated that it would take less than 10,000,000 square kilometres to feed the lot of us, roughly the size of the USA. It is, of course, a bit more complicated than that, but it gives something of a perspective on what we are told and many unquestioningly believe as written in stone. Remember David Cameron and his swarms of immigrants? It generates plenty of hate and very little sense or reason.
In January this year (2017) Oxfam reported that just 8 men own the same wealth as half the world. The report ‘details how big business and the super-rich are fuelling the inequality crisis by dodging taxes, driving down wages and using their power to influence politics’.
That is a system that is irretrievably broken with no political will to change it in the current government or amongst the super wealthy who milk it for personal gain. They are very comfortable with starving people to death to increase their wealth even more. Every time a million children die, by war or famine, it really doesn’t matter how, a rich man yawns, safe in the knowledge that he’s a few billion quid richer.
Theresa May said there is no magic money tree, well yes there is, it’s us and most especially the poorest. Harvesting the poor is very lucrative indeed, it’s been going on for centuries and it is something that pretty much everyone regards as normal, especially the harvested poor who are so successfully deceived they even vote for it thinking, ‘that’s democracy’.
By way of example, there is nothing wrong with our NHS, not with the concept, the founding, nor the enormous task of running it over almost 7 decades, what is wrong with it is the Tories and the corporations who want to suck on its teats and drain it for profit. Richard Branson, who has recently taken over much of the NHS in Bath, is a parasite, nothing more, a parasite who hides his wealth and lives in a tax haven. Branson has been given, or ‘won’ as the Guardian put it, £700 million to run 200 privatised NHS and social care services in Bath. Whatever motivates Richard Branson, it isn’t an overwhelming, altruistic, sense of philanthropy. He isn’t some kind of popular hero or man of the people, he’s a corporate blood sucker.
If you are reading this it won’t be on the mainstream media or reported on television, those billionaire owned, tax evading, corporate bastions of the status quo, which includes our publicly funded BBC, you’ll be reading it on Facebook or on my blog or the citizen media outlet, The Dorset Eye. And that is the proper place to be reading it, far from the corporate lobbyists and the dark influences of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his evil media empire.
But for me, if we want to understand just how all this works and what we can do about it, than we can do no better than watch and engage with the banquet of corporate carnage and murder that is Grenfell Tower. We need to pay attention to what the priests of power are saying, certainly, but we should be bolted and riveted to what the survivors are saying, who refuse to be silenced. Grenfell Tower was state murder and the state is the last thing which should be trusted to investigate the murders they have committed. If the survivors want an inquest or investigation then the chair of those inquiries should be found in the angriest and most horrified residents, who should also be committee members, who will never fear to ask the most brutal questions, no matter how many times they must be repeated, nor rest until they have the answers, no matter how many times they must be demanded.
The system will never fix itself and if anyone who is not at least a millionaire thinks that Theresa May and her government has their back, then they are at the very least deluded and at worst complicit in a system that doesn’t give a flying fuck for the lives of ordinary people.
If Grenfell teaches us anything it is that the system is stacked against us and the only way to deal with that is to speak out and keep speaking out and not wait in an orderly queue for permission to do so. As the late Howard Zinn put it, “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
The question then becomes, can we change? And then, dare we change or are too many of us suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and siding with our oppressors? Because it will be a cold day in hell before there is any justice being volunteered for the people of Grenfell Tower from those in power. That’s why they and we must demand and keep on demanding until the system is so rattled and shaken it bloody well falls over.
KOG. 20 July 2017
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/30/david-cameron-migrant-swarm-language-condemned
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
Reblogged this on michaelsnaith.
Reblogged this on vondreassen and commented:
DID THATCHER & CO TURN THE CONSERVATIVES INTO THE TORIES ? * DID BLAIRE 8 CO TURN LABOUR CONSERVATIVE ?- PHONIES
Reblogged this on The Night Owl and commented:
I have only just come across the Blog that the following words to my introduction comes from, but these words, so much more eloquent than my own, speak the truth of our country today.
If we give in, and let this war-mongering, power-stealing government continue on the road it is travelling down, then we’ll have no-one to blame, except ourselves, when anarchy erupts onto the streets of our cities.
There have been almost 4 decades of rule by right-wing millionaires, and billionaires, who have stolen everything worth keeping in the UK, who have privatised everything that we paid for with our own taxes, and who tell us ‘tough luck’, when we lose our jobs, and demand the support our grandparents, parents, and we, ourselves, paid in to, in case of need – and they change the wordings of our safety net, into ‘benefits’, as if it were from their own largesse that they are paying us from – another kind of theft – instead of from what we have already contributed to, and which is our right under law – until they change the laws, of course!
But everything that we took so long to build up – our NHS, our Social Care, our Police Force, our Justice System, our Fire Brigade, our free school systems, naming but a few – all of this is busilly being sold off to the lowest bidder as I write this.
Grenfell Towers is only the latest atrocity caused by our government’s lack of humanity, lack of compassion, lack of forward thinking, and if something doesn’t change, and very soon, I dread to think what will happen next!