Civilization and the River
-Reversing Social Austerity and Validating a Popular Progressive Society
Why?
Why the Collapse?
Social Austerity and our loss of democratic control to debtors has crippled society, rightly enraged us and out of necessity is politically awakening the global constitution of ‘We the People’ of our world.
This great strain on societies resources, this great gap, is been blamed on different scapegoats, the wealthy usually like to blame it back on society, implying life’s population is the burden, that our societies expectations are to great, wages are unsustainable, people want to much, our multitude health needs are an unending waste, a weakness that the sensible mature wealth of this world just cant in good conscience afford! Look at the barbarity of the ‘health’ bill that just passed in USA Congress, it will cause at least 24 million more people to lose health protection, but it gets celebrated by the wealthy in power as a ‘victory for freedom’… freedom from responsibility.
The majority of people polled everywhere naturally disagree, people think and feel this social austerity is not a fair reward for our work, that society is underfunded and we should expect and have more to fulfill all our lives and societies potential. We protest, because there is a lack of money in wages, taxes and spending, yet at the same time we see there is greater profits being made and boasted in our world, than ever before.
Why is our world set this way? Because it is natural and was always meant to be?.. No, the world changes and leans to different directions according to action and influence.
One great influence is Democracy, which translates as the Rule of People. But the influence of people’s voice and vote has been usurped by private and corporate wealth. Gigantic never before existing corporate powers have now grown and manifested to influence our world. This is a key fact. Social Austerity which has rightly angered and makes desperate the lives and pride of our majority, is caused by the great wealth not paying its fair share, why don’t they?
Because they do not have to! Corporations are courted by nations. Its we nations who follow and compete to please and favour their interests, why?
Because they can simply Hop. If they don’t like their deal, if wages and taxes are not low enough, if environmental regulations are not compliant to their interests, they Hop!
The Hop
Is this hopping just a law of nature?
No, they hop because it is an advantageous dynamic for them to exploit, to get our nations to compete against each other and we do, we compete in a race to the bottom of our own societies wealth, health and future. We compete to increase our austerity and environmental loss, to help them continue to profit and become ever more influential and powerful, over our lives.
This ‘race to the bottom’, this contraction of social austerity and suicidal environmental collapse is getting worse and worse. Causing anger, doubt and fear in people. Even making some of us so desperate as to lose confidence in our character’s fair reason, in our dignity and the grace of compassion, letting ourselves instead become hopeless, divided and conquered cowards, putting our fear and blame more easily onto the consequences, the victims of the economy, on the local poor and jobless, on enviously reversing the hard one equality of proud minorities, or blaming migrants of economic poverty and refugees, victims who must exodus the murdering global consequences of our cruelest industry, War.
But how do we change this desperate economic dynamic, this doomed global race to the bottom, so big businesses wont hop and might chose to stay and pay their fair share, to follow our democratic common sense agreements for mutual survival?
We turn from the established leaderships, because we’ve seen that their pro corporate low tax and wage Centre, is not offering a choice to vote for real effective change, from this doomed dynamic, no plan of change to achieve a better funded fairer world that is not this way. But how could it be different, this is the Market we must follow, this is how its meant to be, many repeat and echo this, making it seem absolute and true.
It is not.
We Are The River
Yes we can influence, we can guide the market for better, like our great ancient civilizations who’s necessity, with confidence, learnt and acted to guide the rivers on which they lived and depended so as they could better grow and prosper! But how do we today fix the river/market in our social interests with out corruption, bias and causing it to dry up and collapse?
I believe the answer is possible once you have questioned the problem and decided to act. We must unite the world’s nations in an agreement to benefit all our economies. An agreement in regard and to the purpose of ending, the necessity of our nation’s competing with each other into lower and lower wages and corporate taxes, in what is such a mutually doomed race to the bottom. An agreement that instead, sets to guiding the global river of all our honest work and efforts to more fairly irrigate and suit our human civilization.
But what kind of agreement, can achieve that?
We set healthy world wide Universal Minimum Wage and Tax Thresholds that all business over a certain size must pay and that cant be lowered and undermined by one nation against another. So, no more special package holiday deals for big corporates, that also unfairly disadvantage local and smaller business.
Now Hopping has less incentive and business has to settle and get on with creating a profit with the way the river is. And it will. Don’t worry and listen to the shouting and bluster of the old gods, business will get on with it because it will be its reality and only way to make profit. But now the wages and the taxes they pay as they go will be fair and flow in to fund all our societies and nations around the world. People can prosper and live where they wish and not where they must. Democracy will not be twisted to the river, the river that We work, will rightly provide for and serve Our democracy as it flows!
So, as the great civilizations of the world before us once awoke and united to fix the river to benefit their lives and environment, now we must unite, to agree a range of global thresholds in wages and taxes.
To help ensure that business will be attracted to invest in nations with less developed infrastructure, markets and expertise. According to GDP development perhaps, 3 Tiers of Universal thresholds could be set. Developing nations could offer a lower minimum tier in tax and wages but still a decent one. The other 2 Tiers would be set gradually higher for more developed nations with their better infrastructures and education and training to offer potential business as incentive to settle there. But all the tiers of universal minimums in wages and taxes would be set at a good, fair and decent minimum that cant be undercut. So now as the river of the market flows, people of all nations are properly rewarded for their work, real spending and its economy will also rise everywhere with this new wider distribution of income buoyancy! Our societies’ facilities will have the corporate tax previously not paid, to fulfill their best potentials not the lowest cut. Our Democracy will mature to have real and effective meaning beyond the values of economic desperation. Our public forum’s fair and willful consensus of decisions, creating powerful new referendums and agreements, as we invest in our constitutions and direct our futures thru’ the debates of our concerns, values and ideas.
We are the river! Our pride and dignity can have a better world wide civilization and sustainable healthy environment if we agree to guide and command our river’s to fairly irrigate the land.
NOW, this clear and practical idea of setting the river’s flow to ensure society’s prosperity, will have opposition!..
Wholesale Corpratism
The economic chaos exploiting retreaters like trump, brexit and le pen and all the rest who offer an autocratic brute and shallow civil war inducing realization of national ego, encouraging their supporters to revel in their suppressed fears, envy and hate and misplace their blame against blind caricatures of each other.
In the USA this new great so called ‘Economic Nationalism’ has instead, shown itself to be a brazen advancement into Wholesale Corpratism. After waiting 100 days trump reveals the real deal is for huge corporate tax cuts. To go along with his dismantling of the rest of the people’s society. Maybe this might attract a few corporate pharaohs to return to USA and have cheap pyramids built in their honour for low wages. Thats ‘Jobs’ get ready for a ‘great nation’ of worthless corporate slaves, waving empty flags, made to feel satisfied and empowered instead by a colosseum of cruelties to weaker minorities living among them.
A nation is all its people. Their is nothing nationalist about trump, the corporations he is appointing to run the nation will not be obliged, or even be asked to give a better deal in wages, and obviously not in tax. Their new deal is a sellout future, of humiliations not national pride and dignity, a betrayal of what the true wealth of a nation, its people, could have and deserve by their honest work and life.
The same is true for brexit, le pen and the rest who offer the hype of solution by this glorious retreat from the world community of possibility, thru’ a xenophobic nationalist charade. It is only by the regaining of corporate tax and fair wages thru’ international agreements of universal tax and wage minimums that our social austerity and the race to the bottom can be reversed. Only by international unity not retreat that ‘a good deal’ can be realized and a future thats ‘great’ can be founded.
But this wholesale corpratism that calls itself nationalist, wont be the only obstacle against a practical solution to our austerity. An international agreement for Universal Minimums in fair and decent Wages, Taxes and Environmental protection will also be fiercely condemned, ridiculed and scorned as a most unrealistic impertinence by the establishments of so called Centrists who have led us to this underfunded low corporate tax and wage social austerity crunch.
Centrists
They call themselves Centrists as if their way is not an ideology, not a left or a right or even an opinion but simply our now and forever truth! They believe most righteously their market worshiping ideologies rise to power was ‘the end of history’.
They ‘Follow the Market’ and so like the days when a pro aristocracy Catholic Church would not allow peasants to change their fates and given stations in life as it was God’s will, the pro corporate market Centrists wont allow us to fix how our wage and tax river’s work as it is the Market’s will! As if we are all apart from our world, consumers, passengers, grazers to be harvested, dumb spectators not actors in our own lives, for as they say Our history has ended!
We have been, sleepwalking on this ideology, worshipping only the will and values of business profit, our art and soul’s voice is seen as redundant and unemployed to this rat race. All the unique consciousness of our individual multitudes and whatever the willful votes of our democracies, are but useless arguments to this generalized and disinterested dark age. We fear the occult of ratings agencies, whose mysteriously augured predictions can devalue a nation’s earned savings and perceived wealth overnight. The stock exchange doesn’t invest in new business, it disinvests and plunders the works of our real economy. Its a fantasyland through which ‘financial wizards’ can cast spells to profit off our real world lives.
The established centrists have enabled the rise to power of these unelected corporate kings and their insidious access all areas corporate lobbyists. We experience the low tax low wage social desertification of austerity, because their great wealth is not been obliged to pay its fair share. But now inevitably from these repeating economic crashes there is, a growing inescapable conscious resolve in people, people know it and want to vote for a real change from it, where corporate wealth is made pay its fair due share back in like everyone else.
The End of trump?
Medieval serfdom, like the early American colonists wished to leave behind them in Europe, is trump’s new budget ‘for american greatness’ a plan for ‘unleashing peoples dreams’ by taking all the money still left in their society and squandering it to an even greater murdering waste of war industry, xenophobia blood sports and more cherries to the cakes of his rich corporate barons, Excelsior! Born in money and contempt with his characteristic golden head top, trump has been richly empowered all his life, he has no experience of how ordinary people live in the society he is gutting. When people are at their worst fates, sick or dying it is money and the burden of cost to loved ones they must worry about first not their health and life. His huge health cuts on the poor and middle incomes are a war against our humanity, trump accelerates us into a growing world of insincere tokenistic capitalist rations, of a nation with semi or no state responsibility for its people, instead of a great society that takes care of its human values whatever they cost.
He appoints wholesale corporate wealth to control every state department, its full speed ahead for global environmental collapse, he’s at war with the courts and rightly they’re stoping him, he now talks of whistle blowers and freedom of speech on our internet as ‘deeply troubling’, he visits cruel dictatorships to congratulate them, he launches elective missile strikes against undeclared enemies while having ‘really delicious chocolate cake’, he boasts with pride of deporting and crushing good peoples lives he brands criminal, he green lights police to murder who they like he’s got their back, he snorts inhumanities like cocaine, wanting more and more. This ugly showman’s brand, is committed to the constant inflation of an ever expanding balloon, a wind bag of outrageous shock and awe reversals of our human rights, hopefully if he doesn’t kill us all first, trump and all who sail in him are going to finally explode that balloon with ‘the Biggest Ego Meltdown in the World’s History of Losers’ as he himself might tweet and twitter it!
The scary Spectre and in deed the true danger of the trump, may be enough of a nightmare to drive and deliver the mass protests of people’s popular progressive anger and hopes, which where originally against social austerity, back again with relief into the arms of the failed Centrists. Even though they remain un changed in their, pro corporate low wage and tax ideology, that bankrupts society and led to the austerity that led to trump. But doctor’s logic says no, we need a practical and real change to refund society, not just another pro elite Centrist to save us from terrible trump, who will promise, and get corporations to agree, to smile more again!
A Return to Extreme Centrist Failure?
So we need a real change of the fundamental problem, not just enough to seem progressive and decent. We must change the international race to the bottom or we have changed nothing. Most centrist politicians may now be clever enough to show they ‘feel the pain’ but put forward no real idea for change. They will likely not prefer to reflect, grasp, and believe in popular progressive demands to come together and agree, to shape a better economic river. They will say, that if we dare change the river, that it will dry up and all hell will collapse upon us. They heckle us to fear our common sense, because to their extreme market ideology all change is infantile. They believe private profits growth must come before people, because ‘it raises all boats with it’. But instead we have crash after crash with rich bailouts and social austerity and repeat. Now, like the fantastic propaganda of a dying regime the unchanging Centrists incredibly proclaim we are growing prosperous again, we hear this as most experience a continued race to the bottom. If we cant effectively oblige corporations to pay back good tax and wages, then no matter their growing prosperity of record profits, it does not matter and count as our prosperity!
Desperate to hold to power and relevance Centrists wish to fight back, so conveniently they equate and deride all ideas and voices for change, as the same mad threat to peoples ‘stability and future’. They attack the humanitarian popularity of the socially progressive Left, and like to merge the Left with the real threat of the Far Right, when they slyly try declare them both to be the ‘Extremes’ of this new and ‘Dangerous Populism’. I can understand what is been meant by ‘Populism’, but it is an often and easily misused term to slander all change to the established status quo and it is misleading term to diagnose the irrational and divisive envy, fear and hate the Far Right wishes to trigger and unleash in people to gain their support. Why not call out xenophobia and other dangers by their name and not call them a term that presumes them naturally popular? The Centrists never want to debate their hollow hype, they just repeatedly sum it up for people like we’re children in what are certainly populist mantras of ‘Stability, Security’ ect. By branding the danger ‘populism’ they imply our democratic popular vote itself is a danger, a danger that might let us finally not vote for them!
Democracy is the awoken popular will of people, that each time takes a chance that hopes to change our society, for the better or what may be worse depending on what choice the money in politics and news media allows us to chose from. It is Centrist’s stagnant denial in the face of their chronic failure, that is neither a stability or responsibility. What we do or allow is what we will become. By being pro corporate profits for so long, it is the Centrists who have created this dangerously low corporate tax and wage social austerity, and our inevitable race to the bottom, competing in all our indignity of nations, for ever smaller, shaved scraps.
A Race to the Top?
The river is made of our lives and labour, we will not dry up as long as we live, this great living river on which we all trade lives thru’ we the people! So if we set its tax and wage minimums to healthy water levels world wide, corporations will have to just, get on with it.
But these world wide minimums are really a good progressive and stable idea for everyone, because it means corporate and all other business will no longer need to hop nations to compete against others who do. They will in fact more likely now need to compete by offering better more useful products to the market.
Also thru’ this changed dynamic business will have to offer higher wages to attract their workers from other businesses. A calmer competition can begin, a race to the top instead, for the work of people and society! If we are confident and hopeful and remember the river and the market is us, we can reverse the destructively competitive dynamic that has reduced us all. Why not, we have democracy and the numbers, we also have a growing international consciousness, thru’ which we find and echo our common causes, cheap travel and migrants and refugees bring fresh perspectives and experiences, a new wider unity, also made more easily possible thru’ our cheap open internet, we must keep it open!
Lets follow nature’s eternal optimism through which we where born, when we seek to regenerate our economic priority a have a happy re birth of our societies central value. We can have a new Renaissance!
Competition and Evolution
There is positive competition that drives business to make better products people want. Competition to test and decipher objective truth is what progresses science. In arts there is a subjective competition within each heart and mind to better echo and enlighten our existence. In every person’s life, there is competition against the time we get to live, that drives us to better realize ourselves and be true to our communication of that with those we must oppose and those we love. Our societies hope to win an empathetic competition against injustice, that seeks better more equal laws ect. Much competition is a good positive drive for a better quality to our evolution.
But a harmful competition, that reduces our societies’ welfare, environment and growth, a competition that pits us all against each other in a race to the bottom, is an evolutionary death.
International corporate business is locked in a ruthless competition to maximize profit that has no boundaries. Environment, social funding and wages are dissolving to increase their competing race for profits. We must regain control now, using our available national democracies and getting them to unite internationally to mutually agree on more healthy global corporate tax and wage minimums, to end the extreme ‘race to the bottom’ destabilization caused by corporations cut and running from dependent nations, so as to better compete against each other and keep more and more profit. But if business has to pay the same where ever it goes then it and we are free of this unlimited competing for private accumulation, a calmer competition can be worked, bounded by equal global healthy minimums of wages and taxes, a non destructive competition who’s profits are more fairly shared back to serve society, workers and our environment’s survival.
Money Usurps Democracy
Legally allowing large money donations to politicians, clearly ends an open participation in democracy, for anyone but the rich. We can end donations and instead use the new fairer taxes, to also fund political participants according to their current level of votes. New candidates can get a quota of signatures of citizen support to secure their initial funding before first election. Bring politics back to the people’s table!
The Original Nation
What is the original nation? Is their a particular moment of influx to a landscape that became its perfect state? An imagined national Xanadu that if only it could return to then it would be returning to its true self. When we look back at the declaration of the USA nation, we see that most of the population living there then where not counted in it. Afro americans where slaves and could not vote, so to Chinese, Irish and other cheap labour where put down in divided layers of ‘less than’ all while they built the nation and the actual Original Native Tribes of the continent where been ethnically cleansed. So most of the true nation’s actual occupants even then, where not the nation.
Often a nation’s unexamined perception of its ‘great time’ was when it was able to bully others more easily. Its not surprising nations with colonial exploitation legacies often have more robust national fascistic parties. Republicans & trump. Conservatives and brexit. French and le pen. But the French also have a pride in been one of the first to overthrow aristocracy and try for a popular enlightenment. Their recent vote against the xenophobic nationalism of le pen was perhaps more confident and assured because of the prouder awakening they had once in their national legacy. In fact, it is moments of unity that create the proud belief in a nation, moments when a nations different diverse strands find themselves come together in a historical common purpose
There is no original nation, a nation is not dead at birth, it lives! Each new life becomes the nation, a land full of the character and beliefs of the people who are born and come there, all trying to live out our short lives as best we can among each other.
Furthermore, our world is no longer an archipelago of Galapagos islands evolving in their unique isolated national species. Nationalism has often been a bluntly irrational form of mass identity that can so easily be wielded to divide and exploit us like frightened herds of sheep? Today we live in a multi cultural and exciting world of cheaper faster travel, fresh and hopeful new migrants and refugees join nations and with more internationally connected relationships and perspectives also revealed thru’ better personal tools of communication and information media. The bursting of national information bubbles makes us harder to control, isolate and exploit.
Stories of national history are vital traces of our human experiences, truths to learn and reflect on, especially when more of the nation’s actual voices can now be heard and added into the echos of histories’ great hall of mirrors. We can visit and re visit our history to try understand ourselves today and the individual multitude of truly diverse stories that make up our nations and our whole world.
Social Tensions
There is naturally tension between all individual living creatures. In a society the confusions of different cultural traditions between the ages of our born generations, between our genders, sexuality, ethnicity and other less obvious differences can be exploited and our fears wrongly scapegoated into them, away for what are more truly economic tensions we should all unite to change.
We are in fact all related to each other and connected by our tensions, personal but common to all in the passage of our lives, such as our health and fears of life and death. We all influence the level of tensions between us and we can encourage them in each other for good or bad. A lot of the tensions in a growing nation could be easily evaporated if all people could feel tolerated to make mistakes as they learn others perspectives and stories. But not to be pretending ignorance of others as a sly form of bullying and mocking minorities especially, by continuously making them feel distant and apart. But if we all can ‘chill out’ and allow our draw bridges, to come down when possible and begin to enjoy a sort of open curious and loving nationalism. A social river that embraces and grows with the stories and heartbeats of its actual populations. Where we clash and are tense is also where we can meet and learn to understand each other, our problems are places where solutions ask and wait to be found!
But for all our personal efforts, this can only be truly possible in a nation of equal opportunities, and justice thru’ equal law and its accountable police.
When a nation’s justice is not blindfolded as it should be, but instead sees and judges its citizens according to profiles set by the stereotypes and satisfaction of the ruling group. But then justice remains blind to the crime of poverty, mass incarcerating its struggling victims and throwing away the key, instead of justice rehabilitating hope and opening eyes to its nation’s social and economic failure, as a crime that causes crime.
Shoes
Here to accompany my words, being an artist, is a picture I just made about the great encounter between europe & refugee people that is occurring, as a consequence of the industry and interests of war.
The refugee people I have portrayed in this moment are Syrian’s, who having crossed the Mediterranean sea in their tiny rubber dingy and are just about to land their hopes and set foot on the shores of Europe. I created the picture from an actual photos sacred trace caught in time.
I title this picture ‘Shoes’
Why shoes? Because we all need them and we understand each other when we try to walk in each others! The picture portrays great multitudes of individual people all gathered together in a moment of expectant spectation, the stadium becomes a vast beach shore where every grain of sand is counted. Making this effort thru’ art to render every individual in the vast crowd together all at once, I hope to awaken and fulfill a respect, for the simultaneous magnitude of all the lives and stories that makes a society. By looking at the real mystery of our gathered multitude as individuals, this social art hopefully asks us to see ourselves and helps us to believe in the true responsibility of how we each treat the other. Are we just spectators or the actors in our lives, is it to be, or not to be!
Freedom and Responsibility
We must each take responsibility for helping to shape our future, our combined conscience and democratic participation can awaken to inform and ensure a good future. But no word or ideas blind faith will let us switch off and save us on its own:
‘Freedom’ Free will’s true consent is the necessary spirit, heart and mind of every life. But without responsibility, for the harm and consequence of our actions into each other’s life and freedom, without true equality and law, there is no common space for freedom, no society.
‘Science’ is not a good or bad pilot in itself either, with out the necessary responsibility of ethics its truths can help war instead of our search for peace, a healthy evolution and survival.
‘Faith’ Religion or any beliefs we live by, including political ideological ones, can be used as a mask to hide a corrupt power’s greed and lies, its faith can twist others into mere triggers and props for our rigged vision, condoning us to allow hate and murder. But with the courage of self honesty, it can help draw us out, to reach beyond our fears and all the world’s bullies. Faith can be our friend and a question, to believe in and witness our life, to find a fair hopeful balance of conscience, to try embrace and see the true spirit and dignity of every one, as our fellow each other, alive together in this world!
‘Surveillance’ Do you modify your behavior and expression because some all seeing entity may be listening and observing you? Do you fear judgment by this spectre in your life? I’m not talking about a heavenly God, this is a private unaccountable entity that has effectively presumed to replace a God’s controlling presence and be obeyed in all our lives. Is that a good thing? Do you want it to stop?
‘Security’ Who’s security? A huge secret agency like the C.I.A. usurps the agency of the people’s democracy in order to protect it? Spying on and subverting everyone, it plans and decides whats ‘Best’ and in trying to control all change in our world its we people who become a threat to its security. You can’t protect democracy by sabotaging and controlling it. To preserve an unchanging status quo of USA power in a community of nations, creates a Frankenstein, a real lie that only more and more murder of people and sabotage of truth can try to protect.
‘War on Terror’ but war is terror. A war to maintain terror and a terror to maintain war?
‘Nationalism’ can be a narrow blunt form of identity, a shoe into which no one truly fits. But it can also be host to open renewal, the melting pot of new found hopes and diverse curious adventures, like the stories and dreams that created Hollywood in the USA! At its best empathy, this successful dramatic mirror becomes a national internationalism that connects with us all, into which the whole world can enjoy to escape, dream and reflect.
Its Up To Us
For better or worse we are responsible. We are our rivers flow in time, its empathy and ripples that consequence into one and other, it is thru’ our actions our future will become. To those who may call such a sensible and necessary agreement for healthy global corporate tax and wage minimums, politically impossible, you should remember, truth is truth regardless of an establishment’s current wishes. Ending Slavery seemed impossible, yet ending it was a truth, that in time with popular progressive support and belief, defeated the established and invested lie of the day.
Wilhelm Reich’s book ‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’ is a famous critical 1933 study of fascism’s rise. In it, he sees the suppressed state of human nature in society, as having 3 layers. “On the surface layer of man’s personality he is reserved and compassionate, his second character layer however, is cruel, sadistic, and contains envious impulses, while his third and final layer is essentially honest and loving”. Fascism embodies and exploits the 2nd layer. As so to does the most brutal unregulated power and freedom form of Capitalism’s competition for wealth.
We can be more than a corporate’s battery farm cattle, swirling spectators of our live’s harvest, as we retreat back bitterly, into a lonely hopeless consumption of our ego’s shallower competing fears and envy of each other. That then, we so easily divided and conquered, sees us all sink to the bottom. The continued empowering of private corporate wealth to rule our future is a titanic social and ecological disaster we wont survive.
Universal Corporate Tax and Wage Minimums
By agreeing to a global charter to set these healthy Universal Corporate Tax and Wage Minimums we can end the international race to the bottom in a fair and practical agreement that will ensure the proper funding and fulfillment of our societies facilities for all nations, to grow our lives and families with good wages and a sustainable environment to live in and enjoy. To no longer destructively compete in this subservient humiliating self defeating race to the bottom, the indignity of our nations that reduces us all. We can have fresh confidence in our own democratic international social power of conscience into our future, to be not vulnerable envious competitors of each other but prosperous and eager to explore all the breath of our healthy world and its great rivers of people!
Our reality and future is up to what we set and agree to do!
Brexit charade and the madness of a practical popular and progressive manifesto
The British Conservative leader has set their snap elections for 8th June 2017. No further information from them is forthcoming. Oh wait, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd is struggling with a solution to the problem of old people living longer. Just in time she remembered her human audience and quickly added ‘& Thats great news’ but the natives remain suspicious!
We’re letting our world be run by people with no morals. But they have absolute commitment, to protecting elite profit from the responsibility of paying a fair share to society, this creates a consequent gap in our societies funding, so they put the blame back on society implying life’s population is the burden, that our societies expectations are to great, wages are unsustainable, people want to much, we’re living to long, our multitude health needs are an unending waste, a weakness that the sensible mature wealth of this world just cant in good conscience afford!
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour party has brought out a new manifesto, to Tax Corporations to pay more of their fair share to society. Without the unity and solidarity of an international agreement to universally raise corporate taxes, it will be difficult for him to succeed in raising taxes much without the corporations leaving. But at least he understands and is willing to represent peoples common sense wish to re fund society from where its fair share is not been paid. The mega wealthy corporations.
This new manifesto has lead to a real rise in opinion polls for the Labour party. Yet the owners of England’s news media and the pro corporate minority in Labour’s self ambitious elite, continues not to support Corbyn even though he has repeatedly been elected by their parties grassroots supporters. ‘Dangerous Populism’ is an accusation that can be purely relative. Progressive popular manifestos and leaders can be scorned and called dangerous and terrible populism to! Jeremy Corbyn is the best British social leader and a true participatory democrat, who’s name the public dare not speak, for fear of been brow beaten as fools by prevailing elites.
Meanwhile in the current state of un real post ‘brexit’ flux, Teresa May, is the darling of the majority of media, though she is not actually an elected Prime Minister! Also she has called a rush election but not yet shared with the public any reality like a manifesto or time to read it if she does, instead she has proudly refused to debate publicly for the election except for last nights, just over hour long, self parody of a debate. More a TV spectacle than a chance to question and reveal anything, its title aptly echos the style of a WWF fake wrestling match, May V’s Corbyn Live: The Battle for Number 10!
‘Now is not the time’ for a real series of public debates and to the Scottish parliament who’s people voted against brexit, ‘now is not the time’ so says teresa the unelected to democracy, now is not the time to look behind the mask of hype. Because behind the nationalist orgasm of Euro blame, there is no Conservative dynamic for a better Britain. Just an even worse deal from international corporate wealth, but that the British elites will better preside in profit over, unhindered by the tyranny of European employee rights legislations.
Brexit exploited the mysterious irrationalities of national ego and combined it with the real threat and losses suffered by social austerity for the benefit of corporate profit. Its a mistake to retreat from the local reality of the European Union, who’s solidarity and unity will be necessary to argue, debate and agree universal corporate tax and wage minimums that can effectively make inescapable the fair and proper rise of tax and wages that society is due and needs from the massive profits of corporations, who can at the moment just Hop nations and get us all to undercut each other in this doomed international race to the bottom.
Hopefully British people will wake up to see behind this brexit’s de-democratizing charade. Corbyn would be a far better and sincerely democratic Prime Minister for the lives of the majority of Britain’s people and a good influence, in our international community of nation’s, solidarity of common possibilities.
Corporations will not be obliged to give Britain a better deal because of brexit, they need now give it even less.
Hopefully, come the snap election on June 8th, the people of the now divided kingdom of Britain, will wake up to the inhuman social austerity of the Conservative’s empty charade and to its arrogant refusal to truly debate and share a manifesto of what voters will be electing. Now is the time for them to stop being led by the pigs of animal farm. Now is the time to shock all that rich invested media’s propaganda and bravely dare to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s practical and progressive Labour, and their manifesto for funding and fulfilling their best society and a future for all.
I hope they proudly surprise the pigs!
What is the Centre?
The centre is a word, that metaphorically implies truth, a correctly aimed value, a fair balance to an an honest heart’s focus.
The low corporate tax and wage political parties, who have favored sinking social austerity, rather than reaching a practical international solidarity, capable of effectively obliging a fairer share of bounty off the ever rising corporate profits, even though its the protection of these profits that is so clearly bleeding our society, environment and future dry, these politicians like to claim themselves as ‘The Centre’.
But what is the centre? What would you like to call the centre? These so called Centrists, believe by putting business interests at the centre of our policy, values and direction, the money generated by the lowest taxes and wages the corporates choose to pay out, will raise all our rivers boats’ with them. But this is repeatedly failing our boats are not rising and many are sinking overloaded and drowning. Gigantic corporate profits are staying at the top. The wealth gap grows, the top % get richer and richer because policy serves and protects wealth’s profit as our central value, so it thrives. At least it shows that what we make our centre will succeed!
Economic crashes and social austerity hit hard and are repeating, de democratizing us to the obligations of debt. This is not human stability, we must change our centre from business profit protection, into our humanity and life on earth’s protection, business is an ever hungry and adaptable creature, it will make a meal where ever it can, it is a mistake to think it must be the centre for it to thrive, priceless life is the central profit of our existence, business and everyone should respect and get their head around the work and value of that. The popular social policies of the progressive left should really no longer be a faction called the left, but our common honest centre. Our society.
Vested opponents of this change of priority will yell and brow beat us that business will suffer and fail if it is not the centre of reality? But in logic, business will thrive in any fair playing field, if corporate tax and wages are raised universally in all nations then corporations wont suffer and lose to competition easily because the fairer wages and taxes they pay cant themselves be undercut. It is only the race to the bottom by internationally unregulated competition in the reduction of wage and tax demands that gives corporates an excuse of need for not paying more, because another business can undercut them, and get it cheeper somewhere else.
‘Reality’ is what we do, allow and agree. Lets agree to have humane values and ideas rise and evolve as our progressive redefined social centre.
Effectively Validating the Progressive Left
The Left may be a little to content with the harm of social austerity, as a reliable catalyst eventually awakening people to the need for progressive ideas of social and economic change. In this time the Left is growing and its practical ideas are destined to be the most popular to common sense because they seek to find the value and interest of people at their centre. But the xenophobia and outrages, of trump and other regressive showmen mocking us in the interests of extreme wealth are making the corporate news more than the popular rise of Left Progressives because, like a bad and fascinating addiction to self harm, in the vacuum of a truly better choice, trump became the corporate king of USA, though he’s facing huge protest and the courts.
In my nation of Ireland’s most recent elections, Social Progressive minded politicians and their varied groupings actually grew dramatically to be elected to half the seats in our Dail/Parliament. The two old ‘Centre’ parties have formed a support agreement to keep their shared policies of low corporate tax and continued social austerity in power for now, but maybe in the next election, which could come any day! In the meantime some of our social progressive groups are showing people they can unite and work to form and develop capable agreements together for our housing crises ect, then they may be trusted in next election an even larger vote from people and have a chance to be the next government.
BUT, if people do vote in and try left wing governments and they fail to end austerity then people wont believe in the left and its good ideas being practical and possible solutions for the urgent realities of their lives and dependent responsibilities.
If we look at the excellent ideas of the left wing social governments that arose in Greece to combat the extreme social austerity imposed on its people by the European Troika and the International Monetary Fund. The Greek’s have been made responsible in debt, to what is really a poorly realized European Economic Union. A union that has failed to responsibly grasp and account for the necessary balances in the integration of its large and small national economies and their gravitational influences on each other. But because the European and International economic system wont integrate its ledgers and take a realistic responsibility, for their common currency yet only half in economic conception’s part in this failure, choosing instead to solely blame, chastise and punish the helpless small economy of Greece and its people, then, no matter how good and humanely practical the Greek government thinks, wishes and is democratically mandated by its people to be, they must capitulate, obey and be seen by their people to fail. All in order for their unfair debt to be nursed on grotesquely, within a socially strangled indebted prison pulse, allowed no real cure.
So when the left fails in one nation, because other nations internationally wont share with and help its good and practical ideas succeed in changing the global dynamic, people still wanting some change can turn to wealthy powerfully authoritarian showmen like trump who use social tensions as their battle ground while actually bringing in wholesale corporate governments that steal and rig everything still left of society and humanity for their continued accumulation of profit and control.
Or, if people in disgust do rightly reject the inhumanity and charades of rich hateful showmen dictators, but see the Left’s progressive ideas and hopes as unrealistic, they may then sadly surrender back again to what they may perceive to be a realistic ‘lesser of two evils’ returning to the repeated failures of the so called Centre and its unwavering elite’s high opinion of itself, no mater the social austerity they continue to inflict. A pro corporate ideological Centre that has led us to an underfunded society thru’ its low corporate tax and wage economy. A centre with no solution to change the doomed dynamic of our international competition to please corporate profit, a competition that results in an ever descending desperate spiral of reduction for our societies and environments future. Civilization’s ‘race to the bottom’.
If progressive left wing government’s in isolation internationally, cant change the inevitable international economy of social austerity, then how can the left validate and succeed to grow further its good and practical social ideas around our world? The answer is in the question, we must petition and unite our national representatives into international agreements to establish and set Universal Minimums to Corporate Business Taxes and Wages, so that the great profits been accumulated there are made pay a fairer share to workers and to the societies and environments they are allowed exist in. Only if there are, inescapable global minimums, will corporates not be able to Hop and cause us to undercut and compete against each other in the consequent Race to the bottom. If social progressives can unite and effectively lead and grow public petitions and support for an international agreement, to end the Race to the Bottom that causes our social austerity, then it will rightly be the Left that becomes the popular and successful humane centre of our future politics and society. By effectively reversing the primary economic desperation of social austerity for people around the world, the Left will be wining a positive platform for all its progressive ideas.
Validating a Better Europe for People
I agree with the outspoken progressive Greek social economist Yaniis Varoufakis on our best future being in a European Union, but that we must urgently protest and turn its ideology around, to change it from the protection of profit into the protection of people and environment as its central purpose.
Europe has made many practical improvements to worker’s rights, but it has failed to gain rises in wages and social taxes from the gigantic international corporations. It has failed to protect and balance the gravity’s of its small and large nation’s economies resulting in the terrible destruction and unfair share of burden and blame put mainly onto the smaller nations to pay as sovereign debt. People protest this rotten lie in small nations, while the larger nations people are busy enough with their lesser but still criticly underfunded social squeeze anyway. The establishment centrists and business media, in these larger more insulated national economies, shamefully distract their citizens to enjoy a false ego trip that blames the smaller nations as foolish spendthrift children, lazy wastrel problems with not enough character and resolve to endure the pain and wisdom of their Centrist and Right wing social austerity medicine!
I agree with Varoufakis and others around Europe and the World, in the importance of campaigning for and wining a Universal Living Wage for all people. This would give people a financial security that many welfare systems already do, but it would give it unconditionally as a fundamental right of human provision. This would have a great success incentivizing business employers to offer better jobs to gain the participation of a people who are no longer so desperate they must take whatever is on offer. Better jobs with a more committed participation of people by choice, the basic living wage would encourage a wider Race to the Top.
BUT, I believe that if we don’t effectively end the core financial underfunding problem, all such good ideas are impossible. We are more and more underfunded, because all our nations must compete against each other in an International Race to the Bottom, lowering our corporate wage and tax rates so corporate business will chose one of our divided nations over another. The growing power of corporate wealth boasts of their astronomical profits, while the world is a desert of angry wasted lives, due to the corporates and shareholders keeping of all that profit, that causes our consequent social austerity. The left must lead campaigns with a clear idea to gain an international global agreement to set Universal Corporate Wage and Tax Minimums, so that business has no big advantage to cut and run from their host nations in order to follow and compete with others that do. Business can settle into stable reliable growth thru’ the work of people who are well paid in a society fully funded. The emperors of corporate profit have no clothes, their massive profits are the missing money, from our societies and wages. Each nation has people, people work and spend, business can profit everywhere, with these international minimums the extreme international race of competition to the bottom, corporates have played against society to maximize their profits will no longer be a practical dynamic for them.
Through a practical change to the ‘Rat Race’ of peoples lives the Left becomes valid. Left wing groups need to work together and form capable governments. The perception of the Left as owning rigid ideal bubbles, to perfect and good for people’s compromised lives, will not embrace popular support but repel it. But also false promises, that compromise and betray practical and necessary ideas for change, because its easier once elected not to challenge the powers that be, will also lose peoples faith. Without convincing popular support through a big practical international success for people’s lives we lose the future.
If all social progressive on the broad Left can help gain popular support to achieve a Global Minimum Corporate Tax and Wage agreement, it would end social austerity and validate the left as a practical and successful champion of the people. Gaining their trust, that its ideas can change our lives and belong to us through our support, it would give great confidence in people further, for a world with life’s dignity and welfare at its centre. Whenever the Left has effectively won real change for people’s daily lives in history it has grown. We can grow and prosper, not working to produce and consume a meaningless nightmare all for an elite’s profit, but by living out opportunities for our own brighter more hopeful ideas and dreams, participating in our society together, with a pride in our life and the work we chose to create now and for our future!
Cynics of Truth
The truth of trump’s words are like cheap throw away tinsel, he deals us out the art of ironic lies. It is true that when people lose confidence and are scared, when desperation has reduced their pride to lashing out in envy and hate, they can willfully deny all reasonable truth. But often it is true that people deny truth for reasons.
The lack of responsible, sustainable and humane regulations in business, ends up obliging its employees to compromise their moral common senses in order to get the jobs they need. When people are made accomplices to bad things they often will defend those things as they defend their livelihood and pride. Like the mutual secrecy of the Mafia. Oil and gas fracking workers become cynical defenders of their employer’s industry. Weapons manufacturing employees supplying terror around the world may feel the need to support and praise that terror, repeating fig leaf excuses used by the bosses and politicians truly involved in the profits of such lucrative contracts. Soldiers must become loyal accomplices against the targets their leaders pick. Though so many ‘troops’ have later come back to protest such hype, by telling the true horror they have seen.
On a wider level, fossil fuel combusting car drivers everywhere in order to have the transportation they may need, are obliged to buy cars they now know add to the collapsing environment and so they have become, perhaps unwilling, accomplices in environmental change. No one likes to be an accomplice, so a car driver’s denial impulse, is to maybe despise the cyclists we pass as smug do gooders and feel like saying ‘environmentalism isn’t living in the real world’, ect. Our mass car usage maintains a large undercurrent of cynical pride against the real world truth of our environmental survival.
So don’t despair, we have not come to the ‘end of truth’ we should just realize the reasons why so many people are forced into or favour the denial of it!
Advertisers, the best guest at any orgy, will naturally exploits these feelings and presents cars, for example, as a powerful ego boost, we are encouraged to cynically destroy the environment at full throttle, ‘hear my engine roar at my guilt, I’m going out in style!’
Our children and future generations wont be able to see it the same way obviously, we must not waste time on guilting individuals obliged often by circumstances to become accomplices in bad things. We must have responsible regulations to end petrol cars, change to sustainable energy production, criminalize and restrict most weapons manufacture that deals in the free expansion of the industry of war around our world, with all its added consequences of the terror that leads to terror. We can drive cars that are good, have jobs in industry that produces good things, if business must change it will change, the river follows the path its given and whatever path we take and work leads to jobs. We’re all together in this world. We’re the supply and we’re the demand! We are the River!
No One’s Perfect
One big weakness the left often shares with the right, is that it can also profile people. To campaign for equality and an end to injustice, but to still see and judge people by their perceived class of stereotype, seeing only puppets of your presumption, instead of been open to a fair encounter with an other’s individual own lived character, is hypocritical and a mistake against purpose. I do understand it is fair to say people should themselves honestly and humbly ‘check their privilege’ in what still is an unequal society. But to judge each other from islands of perfect self righteousness, is bound to repel not unite a mass movement to find their common causes for progressive change.
Better when people of diverse circumstance and experience meet, if they can ignore what doesn’t really matter in their difference and join on what they share, it is vital to live and agree thru’ our essential values and truths so as to unite and confront systemic injustice, to change what causes our inequalities and problems in society.
Then thru’ new relationships beginning and growing, over time with trust, what where maybe just abrasions of each others form of language and experience, may sincerely reach better understandings of each other.
All the best to us all!
– Antonio Carty
(27th May 2017)
(& Revised as of 1st June 2017)
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