Oh, shut up, LibDems

Oh, shut up, Lib Dems.
Every time you open your
wish-divining,
cloying, climbing,
tool-defining,
principle-defying mouths
to bleat conceit absurd,
blood heats
at your right raw nerve
to speak another word.

Champions of serfdom

David Cameron and his Con Party’s latest wheeze to appease the I’ll-only-pay-for-mine brigade is that the unemployed young ‘should do community work’.

The scam, sorry – “scheme” requires NEETs to do around 30 hours a week of mandatory community work and, for this, they will be paid the Youth Allowance, a brand spanking new branding of JSA , at £57.35 a week. The types of jobs? “Making meals for older people or working for local charities, alongside 10 hours of job hunting.”

A forty hour week for £57.35? That’s £1.43 an hour! And will they be sanctioned for the slightest slip? Probably, I reckon, don’t you?

But, there are either jobs available to do or there are not. Making meals for older people and other community work sound like real jobs to me. And real jobs should pay an hourly rate that at least respects the worker’s time if it cannot reflect his or her experience. And a full-time job should supply a wage a person can live on.

Cameron says “what these young people need is work experience and the order and discipline of turning up for work each day.” Experience aside, as that is about time and opportunity and everyone starts out needing that, if a young person has managed to get to school each day for years and stay there, then community work to instil order and discipline is really insulting them.

“From day one they must realise that welfare is not a one-way street. Yes, we will help them, but there is no more something for nothing. They must give back to their community too.” – NEETs are to be assumed as ‘scroungers’ and punished for it – just in case.

The Government seems conveniently to forget that, from the age of 18, these young people are adults under UK Law. But, then, this government is desperately trying to preserve neoliberalism so it is battling against Democracy in order to champion serfdom and where better to reinforce it as a cultural shift than by abusing the least experienced..?

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then there’s money

Well, there’s money
then there’s money, Honey –
plentiful
and spent it all –
It’s funny, really, Darling,
how it readily exchanges
where the sun don’t even shine
– and yet it burns away alarming –
Whereas, further down the line,
it’s hard to earn for love or time
but we’ve got coffers full
for cock and bull:
there’s cash to splash on proxy agents,
business trips for entertainment,
decadent engagements
with a myriad of lobbyists.
We’ve subsidies for corporatists
and Public Service hobbyists;
there’s lashings for a futile folly;
empty democratic jollies;
funds for training frenemies
and spying arbitrarily on each
and any citizen.
And war, we can afford,
of course
but, then,
there’s always funds for killing
in the kleptocratic willing
– economic or blood-spilling –
Just there isn’t any money
for the People, any more.

Away in their cages

Away in their cages, no break for the plebs
The put upon people get deeper in debt
The thieves and the tyrants look down from their heights
And laugh as they profit from entropic spite

A chill wind is blowing through Albion’s lands
As Cons steal and sell all control from our hands
They hover like choppers and inverted snobs
And sanction from mansions like mythical gods

They’ll always browbeat us and won’t go away
Unless we rise up and extinguish their stage
Deliver ourselves of this flat earth nightmare
And build us a future we want to be ‘there’

Farewell, Welfare

Farewell, Welfare.
You cared
How people fared;
Were there
To quell despair;
To square unfair with share.
And you fared fairly well
But now the numbers swell
Under a neoliberal spell:
The bell ends
In a deathly knell,
Telling the overbearing
And the Worried Well
The Safety Net is pared
To fare them well –
While all the rest stare into hell.

Profit’s cosh

Roll up! Roll up!
A feudal gift!
Who’ll start the bid
Where value fits
The drudge
And cudgel never quits
The one pound fish
And nine to five
Disabled fabled
Hung to dry
The young ‘uns squandered
On old lies
From sanction knife
To food bank dish
Workfare, a lair
To bonded strife
On call to all
Or hours of zero calls, at all
The welfare falls
No space to thrive
Takes everything to just survive
Bish bosh!
The cosh of profit lives
Commodified to market wish
Who gives a fig
For equal shares
The serf-bound life
Is spice and grist
To Papa’s neoliberal pish

This is the way

Here we go ’round the Burning Bush
Just one more push
Now shake your tush
Here we go ’round the Burning bush
Praying for an illusion

This is the way we keep the dosh
By corp’rate cosh
Woo hoo! Bish bosh!
This is the way we feed at the trough
Every day is our payday

This is the way we slave each day
Well, you, anyway
From cradle to grave
This is the model we have paved:
Delegating your serfdom

This is the way we spin our words
That’s right, you heard
Define ‘absurd’
This is the way we shepherd the herds:
Every act by our say so

This is the way we use our tools
To shape the rules
Ha ha! You fools!
This is the way we pull the wool
So close your eyes a bit tighter

This is the way we bake your heads:
He said/she said
Our daily bread
This is the way we mould your dread
All our facts are elastic

This is the way we iron our crimes:
We cross a line
Then redefine
This is the way we waste your time
So we will see you next Tuesday

Which is scarier?

Which is scarier?
The constant flair
for incompetence
or the daring contempt
and wilful, cold neglect?
Is it the hair-raising
ineptitude or uptight
laissez-faire of greed
and glaring disrespect?

Whichever –
Do we either care or
neither never spare
forgiveness nor forget?

Dear Lib Dems

Dear Lib Dems,

I know you’re heavily distracted right now but you and your leader seem confused about what has gone wrong.

You got excited.
You thought, like most of the people back in 2010, that this was an economic emergency and that you had a public service duty to negotiate a coalition in the ‘National Interest’. Perhaps it is that you were naive; perhaps it was the long, oh so long awaited chance to be in power that made you blind during those early, heady days.

You have acted, ultimately, as the front men, the shills, the appeasers and apologists for your senior partners. You’ve voted with them time after time, irrespective of whether it was in the citizens’ interests or even ethical and sensible. You have contributed to the increasingly desperate vulnerability of every single group bar the ‘I’m alright, Jacks’. [And don’t you dare think to yourself: “but we’ve lifted (blah number) over of the tax threshold” or that 24/7 childcare and free school meals or whatever your particular defence is today, are wondrous salves and believe yourselves righteous.] You have upheld and then perpetuated a crony status quo. You’ve relentlessly tinkered with and demolished so much, so callously and with real ignorance. You’ve continued to subsidise profiteers with taxpayer money rather than facilitate a liveable income for the majority of the workforce. You built misery instead of houses. Courted the establishment rather than served the Commons. Turned Social Security into a capricious game of fare-well-if-we-say-you-can roulette. You’ve done nothing meaningful to address the real problems of increasing serfdom, asset stripping, the corporate tax fiasco, accountability of once public but now private service/utility provision. In fact, you align yourself with a senior partner who has the intention to do the opposite. You’ve avoided everything the sane and ‘common’ person on the street would have you fix and chosen, instead, to support and vote through the kinds of cruel, divisive, patriarchal false economies that so typify Tory mentality.

A year or so into your partnership, here on the ground, those who did not previously understand economics and finance were travelling a steep learning curve. We came to realise that, although this was indeed an emergency, you were being utterly disingenuous and wilfully obfuscating about a varied and complex set of causes and, therefore, about any appropriate solutions.

You thought that because you kept on message that we would not deviate either. You assumed we were all swallowing the mainstream stenographic tripe. We weren’t. We were educating ourselves elsewhere.

A truer picture began to emerge: Labour hadn’t just ‘created the mess’ – not on its own. It had taken time. Thatcher’s Tories arguably started it; Blair’s Labour ran with it and now, with your willing assistance, Cameron’s Tories were and still are, running amok. We learned that Labour’s general culpability was really no more than any other Western government’s. We learned that none of you actually understands how to, let alone cares about constructing and facilitating an economy that works for the citizens.

So, while you were busy feeling chuffed, we were learning new words and concepts and getting our heads around a new acronym every day. We were learning about limitless leverage, derivatives, LIBOR and other price fixing, bubbles, Ponzis, High Frequency Trading, Credit Default Swaps, paper gold, depraved banksters and traders, Investor State Dispute Settlements, vested interests, politics as a wealth-creating career and investment vehicle, fiat currency Wars.. It was and continues to be an astoundingly long list.

We learned that what private collateral there is is so insufficient as to be emasculated and that you are so ignorant and irresponsible that you will sell any public asset you can think of – be it in physical existence such as Royal Mail or packaged as a financial service such as student loan books. We discovered that The City was a hub for everything from the pretty shady to the downright fraudulent. And, under your ‘helpful’ governance, still is.

We learned that ‘neoliberalism’ was shorthand for ‘capitalism, right-wing, corporate’. We saw that Neoliberals love power and money much more than people. We realised neoliberalism is what’s undermining people and the planet and that it is the obstacle to our sustained well-being. The well-being of billions. We looked around; made the connections. It made us imagine a slope towards fascism as a very possible 21st Century consequence.

We began to understand the whole obscenity. You didn’t. Or you just chose to ignore it. It has to be one or the other because we, out here, we’ve managed to at least grasp the rudiments in spite of the concerted attempts of powerful mainstream politicos to hinder our understanding.

Back in 2010, when you sat down to negotiate, you (must have) realised how unpalatable the reality of a junior partnership in a Tory coalition would be if you were to maintain your reputation – which, as you’ll remember, was not bad at all. You could have shown integrity and told the Conservatives to form a minority government and that you’d support them where you could. You should have. But, even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you were truly earnest and noble in your intent, once ‘in’ you would have had even better opportunities to learn at least the same things as were we down here. One would think you’d have had an epiphany by the end of that first year. And what did you do? You carried on as though the Tory narrative was almost faultless. For four years.

Every time you were called out on it you patronised us as though we were too stupid to know what was good for us. And, not content with that, you now justify your behaviour on the back of ‘recovery’. You seem to think you are, or soon will be, vindicated. Here, on the ground, those of us who have been busy trying to live under your ‘helpful’ governance; those of us doing all that learning: we know this is a recovery for those who need it least; a recovery built on bubbles, corruption, cronyism and the serfdom of the masses. The real shit has not even hit the global fan and there you are, trying to sweep our own dirt under a shifting carpet. It’s a fiat recovery, based on fiat ideology, carried out by fiat authority.

Liberal Democrat doesn’t really shout ‘integrity’ now, does it? ‘National Interest’? Yeah, if ‘national’ means ‘Westminster’ and ‘interest’ means ‘self’.

And now you think you’ve done so badly in the EP Elections because of your debate with Farage. Ok, that really wasn’t very impressive… your better arguments were not just lost amongst the crude populism of Farage but you demonstrated that you really do not understand that those people who take issue with the Union, do so for rather different and more sophisticated reasons than the xenophobic, corporate, anti-intellectual platform that is UKip. You were the only party with the integrity – AND platform – to defend the concept of Europe and you wrecked it by wasting time repeating rhetorical catchphrases and endorsing a retarded sycophancy for the technocratic status quo. You seem to think that anyone who sees Europe as having or being a problem, views it through the Tory/UKip lens. You really have to stop listening to hysterical mouthpieces. And we don’t all want to leave Europe just because we don’t agree with you, either. It’s the technocracy, the receding democracy, the neoliberal bullying, the corporatisation, the commodification of our lives that we hate, not the Social Chapter, nor ‘red tape’ that acts for Common Interest, nor our fellow Europeans. You need to understand that for a great many of us, the problems we see in Europe are the same problems we have with our own, successive UK governments; the same problem we see in nigh-on every country on the planet, in fact.

Seriously – that TV Farage-Clegg trip: that was just a recent straw out of a bale’s worth. But why would you see the connection between these points when you can’t seem to even see them individually? Some of your party are even tabloid-riven enough to suppose that getting rid of your leader is the solution. Nick Clegg might be the authorised face of your toxicity but, my gods, if you think we don’t know all your higher profile names or your collective voting record, you probably should all just give up – right now.

It’s a global economy supported by a neoliberal attitude and our country is in trouble because our own politicians, economists, and media are of the same means by which much of this infernal crash came about. You have failed because you cannot appreciate either the details or the whole picture and you have failed to recognise that the electorate increasingly does.

There is much satisfied vitriol in the country at your fall from grace. On the surface it’s deliciously tempting and quite understandable. You brought this circus to town. But it’s also a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for your once rational, honourable party and a serious blow to an already dwindling faith in our democracy.

Regards,
Juli

Proper Job

They’ve done a proper job on you and me. What used to be a steady wage, for steady hours, now is rare. Well, actually, so’s any hours, any money, anywhere.

Our staple daily bread is dead as we regress at pace and all our damned-fool Power Tools can offer in response is to debase us with a nonsense and start pushing instability as normal to the point of formal policy and even as a patriotic diktat.

They have stitched us up a beauty now this status quo submission is repackaged as a duty – they don’t even tie a bow on anymore. Not now the poor and getting poorer have to take what they can get and keep their hungry little mouths closed and their empty hands behind their heads and smile like they are wise enough to passively accept that someone’s got to make the sacrifice. And who else could the bleeders get to prop them up for nearly free if not the likes of you and me?

Oh, yeah, they’ve really done a number: either seedy plunderer or plundered victim be.

They want to keep us busy fighting every other mucker over every sorry scrap in an exhausting competition for a life whose very dignity is on a knife-edge constantly. That way they figure we’ll be far too frenzied, tired, weak and humble, we won’t have sufficient strength to grumble when they send the robots in.

For then, the ones who work for zip will just have even less of it and we’ll be truly free to be and do and have eff all some more. By now we really ought to recognise the final score: that modern leisure is for those who can afford to have the pleasure and the ones who can’t can, by their own lack of means, go to the wall. As though the greedy, crony bastards cannot wait until the day comes when they don’t need any citizens at all.