On empowering the poor

 amelioration, empowerment, fear, left, poorism, poverty, right, sorted  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 
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That’s the issue to hand, isn’t it?  How to empower the poor.  The right obviously believe that what the poor really need is a good kick up the backside; and according to such theses, we need, as a society, to put the frighteners on them all so that – out of thin air – they will somehow manage to magic themselves better jobs, better schools, better housing and better lives.

On the other hand, the left are looking to implement ameliorative policies which, little by little, succeed in providing a better environment first – an environment which, so the argument goes, will lay the foundations for future success. 

The left say that without the environment, everything is unfair.  The right say that without the fear, nothing ever gets done.

But surely what we all need to do is sit down round that inevitable negotiating table – for a battle and war of sorts it has certainly been to date; and then proceed to ask the poor how they actually see the situation … how they would best like their lives to pan out.

Instead of grandly doing and undoing prejudiced generations of political guesswork, how about we truly empowered the very people at the centre of it all?  Give them the control and hold over the very levers of power.  Directly.  Without prejudice. 

Without political grandstanding.

Give them – for the first time ever, that is – both the right and holy duty to actually decide what gets down, how and why.

And in the process, remove both fear and amelioration from the equation that is poverty on this planet.

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How the dependency culture is here to stay – precisely because the Coalition says so

 a con, anti-poor, benefits, benefits cap, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, dependency, Iain Duncan Smith, independence, poorism, salary cap, the rich  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 
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The benefits cap the government proposes is all in the news at the moment.  Left Foot Forward uncovers six myths you might be interested in finding out more about here.

Meanwhile, if the meme really is how we all need to work together to get the country out of the massive mess recent economic and political histories have engendered, why isn’t the government also proposing a salary cap?  Why, in fact, every time it proposes a new policy, does it prefer to further impoverish the already impoverished in society?  Why doesn’t it look to other methods of resourcing the country’s wealth?

Why is it all so damnably one-sided?

A quotation attributed to Ralph Nader came my way this morning which made me think that perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere here.  It goes as follows:

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” — Ralph Nader #business #leadership

As far as I can see, Cameron & Co understand quite the contrary.  And it’s absolutely clear that they don’t want to remove the dependency culture at all.

Instead, what they really want to do is transfer our sense of dependency from the state to their private sector buddies.

Not change us at all, then – just rearrange the furniture for the benefit of their deep-pocketed sponsors and bosom business pals.

Leadership?  You gotta be joking.  The Coalition know as much about the true tenets of leadership as did the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  They don’t want to amplify our initiative – they just want our docile consumer complicity.

And that’s a really long way from encouraging independence of action.

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The fundamental contradiction at the heart of Coalition thinking (or the real benefits society)

 a con, Coalition, left, left-wing politics, political dissonance, Tories  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 
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There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Coalition thinking which the left is failing to clearly define; an unenunciated contradiction which – as a consequence – is serving to confuse us all.

On the one hand, Cameron & Co don’t believe in a benefits society and – instead – claim to believe in what we might term an initiative society.  On the other hand, however, their sponsors are massive corporate institutions – accustomed to a ready supply of wage slaves who know their place and are accustomed to staying put.  So whilst the government suggests in its spin we should all become entrepreneurs, the reality is that in its policy it is orientated towards making labour cheaper and more plentiful – that is to say, anything but entrepreneurial. 

If my thesis is right, the benefits mentality isn’t even primarily engendered by the state but, rather, by the millions upon millions of workers who spend their lives ensconced in a corporate cocoon of bonuses, pensions, career ladders and perks.

And if that’s not a benefits society, I really don’t know what is.

In a perfect Coalition world, what the Tories and their supporters are looking to achieve – then – is a) for no one to claim benefits; b) for the privileged to maintain their position as entrepreneurs at the top of the hierarchical pyramid; and c) for the wage slaves to earn just enough to keep them content, politically neutered and docile – as well as out of the horrified public view which some mainstream media, even under such a regime of political duplicity, are still currently prepared to contemplate.

And until the left is able to reveal this reality in a punchy and convincing way, the dissonance created by naked “do as I say, not as I do” politics – visible primarily on the right end of the spectrum but with an increasingly hearty support on the left – will continue to leave the progressives falling violently between two stools. 

Two stools which are allowing the Coalition to get away with ruddy murder.

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