stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: SW London (UK)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
Ken and Gordon are as much in the grasp as anyone RL.
Agreed. Only now we have Boris Johnson here in London. We will see what happens.
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
What the City want is business as usual, according to the standard of usual which has been engineered for their success. Anyone who can and will ensure that measure of usual continues, is their man. And their man also wants usual to continue, for that is what his platform is built upon.
True, for both good and bad. What is business if not to make money? I have nothing against businesses making money, nor against capitalism. What I do have an issue with are the leeches and parasites in the City found among them who want to preserve their old 'arrangements' and 'not rock the boat' so that they can continue bleeding this country dry at the expense of the people. This was Thatcher's mistake which she committed with good intentions (though I never shared her ideology because you could see what was coming a mile off) but for which this country is paying very very dearly.
The Berlin Wall didn't fall for freedom and liberty, but for profit and access to cheap labour. No need to wonder whether I'm writing the truth here, just take a good look (and I mean a good look) at what's happening all around you.
This is where we have the main problem. This country needs change, but the City and their 'friends' in the media want to preserve the status quo. The idea of success should become quality of life and not making a profit at all costs.
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
For those few benefitting from it, its wonderful. For many, the electoral platform of our glorious supposed leaders, its fine - they have the illusion that it benefits them too; and perhaps it does as long as they play the game - a game in which one wrong move makes you part of the sizeable minority for whom it is the engine of disenfranchisement and woe.
Exactly. Blaming the people at the bottom for their own misfortune and carrying on regardless clearly hasn't worked. It didn't work under the Tories, it hasn't worked under Labour, and it won't work under any other government.
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
I guess the issue I'm identifying is the widening wealth gap which I see as driven by the City. We don't need redistribution of wealth by way of taxation - we need redistribution of wealth by way of limiting the influence of the City to do anything which will not benefit the nation as a whole and benefit each member of the nation.
Exactly. From what I can see a drive for profits, making people compete against one another and not addressing the problems caused by revolutionary changes in the way we live fuelled by advancements in technology hasn't created or increased wealth, but is actually threatening it and working against it. Perceiving people as a resource which is either profitable or not isn't working.. we need to completely ditch the concept of 'human resource' and get back to the concept of 'human'.
Having spent many years encouraging people to live beyond their means in some sort of illusory existence of affluence we now have one of the biggest social problems ever faced in our history, and that is to condition a large percentage of the population to return to living within their means and buying only what they can pay for. This is going to be something which is extremely difficult for any government to achieve, because you're asking the City to accept the necessity of greater investment for lower profits and smaller markets.
Hard as it may be for people to accept the only other alternative is to rebuild society from the bottom up. That 'underclass' of people at the very bottom of British society may well turn out to be our salvation and a key element to solving our problems. I feel therefore rather than perceiving them as 'problem people' we need to drop the labels, start perceiving them as 'people' just like us, and instead of shunning them and excluding them from society we need to find ways of bringing them back into society.
If there are less and less jobs to be found, then from what I can see the obvious solutions are getting those people dependent on benefits into some sort of occupation - community care, self-employment, entertainment, culture, sport, and through this occupation work with them to bring their own contributions to the community and to society as a whole. I am part of this process through what I am doing with theatre, but I am not the only one and what I am doing is just one tiny fragment of the whole current change in mindset.
These people cannot be just moved around or dispersed back into society. One London borough has tried. It decided it would solve the housing crisis by resettling homeless people into the private sector. One of the first cases was resettling a man with a long history of alcohol abuse miles away from his support network to... a double bedsit above an off licence. Anyone care to suggest what was missing here?
Before we can ever hope for any realistic political changes I feel we in ourselves as a society need to change some of our attitudes and to start finding ways of coming together as one nation and not two nations in one divided by income and occupation and lack of it.
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
I'm expecting now a set of statistics which indicate the catastrophic effects on GDP and GDP per capita that what I'd like to see would mean. I hold these statistics to be interesting, but largely worthless in my aim. GDP per capita means nothing when 10% of the per capita population hold 90% of the wealth, and also thereby 90% of the opportunities, and another 10-20% are entirely poverty stricken for want of any means to improve their situations.
E
We need to forget about GDP per capita and other statistics and get other statistics which will give us a better insight into what is actually happening in society. How many people are claiming benefits? How long? Why are they claiming benefits? How many people are homeless? We need to be taking a greater interest in those people at the bottom and looking for ways not to stereotype them and exclude them, but to help them make the changes they need to bring them back into society.
Yes it means more taxes, more spending on welfare, the development of new initiatives to enable these people to return back to society. It means facing up to the truth, admitting mistakes, learning to share, to cooperate, and to seek unity over division with others.
We need to listen to them to find out where they would like to be in society (from what is possible) and not impose on them where we feel they should be in society, and do what we can to help them achieve those goals. My theatre/charity has just done some research into what happens with people who have been on benefits and found employment through the Job Centre Plus offices and we have found that by and large, they have taken menial jobs in the service industry sector and within a year have had to go back on benefits. This is hardly a solution. This explodes the myth that people on benefits are generally lazy, they are just unwilling to take on employment which doesn't offer them any guarantee of remaining employed on a long term basis and from my perspective they cannot be blamed for refusing to take on jobs which quite often pay only slightly more than what they receive on benefits and which incurs additional costs such as travel.
Having seen at first hand the devastation and destruction of Eastern European society and the survival of the fittest mentality of the free market which has created numerous success stories but left behind a lot of poverty and a mass of social problems in its wake I can only conclude that Keynes did have a good point, as did Karl Marx.
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RE: in the ghetto........ - 
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RE: in the ghetto........ - 
(Again, in order for this to be successful, good planning and management of the social services is needed.) 
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