Anti Upside Down Austerity?
Stoics can endure austerity & hardship for a cause worth fighting. Austerity can be a heroic act of empathy to share with others. Protecting and preserving the environment of life on Earth is about austerity in our pollution and our use of finite resources, it is an austerity from greed.
So, I think to say we are against ‘austerity’ itself is not true.
True what is meant by anti ‘austerity’ is we are against the financialised ‘monetocracys’ crusade to strip society s cost to maximize profits & compete in the grand global continental race to the bottom of a voiceless pit neutering effective participatory democracy while instead enriching freewheelin’ corporations with more power and the share of our wealth to whom austerity is a word they themselves must never hear lest they move to the next country advertising its daughters for sale to it.
But the rich’s campaign of austerity against the poor is to some extent of languages impartial confusion, harnessing the natural virtues of sacrifice inherent in the word ‘austerity’. We need to coin what we are against more clearly and take it back from them, I think it is better to say we are ‘Anti Upside Down Austerity’ ?
Who is Atlas?
There is a myth been used that the rich are paying the majority in tax and so the rich are who we should not protest but thank, for they be like Atlas, the ancient Greek god who holds up our World. But this compartivly high figure of tax paid by wealth is not a virtue of the wealthy s sacrifice for our society it is an admission that the corporations & wealthy are earning so vast an amount that the small percentage of tax that eventually makes it to them to pay is that large. Its like the tell tale sign of an iceberg, if they are paying that much tax we know by the law of corruption 9 times more or 20 or 30 is below the sea in their pockets. It shows that average workers themselves need to get paid many times more so that they to can share the burden and honour of giving a small percentage of that back into a significant tax share!
The wealthy are no Atlas, they are by profession of greed the parasites needling & sucking the real Atlas’s in the legs as it labours to hold up our world despite their attacks. The Atlas who holds up the world is the environment who greed & growth does not pay any tax or responsibility to. It is all the every day multitudes of workers who get paid so little for the real worlds work, that it amounts to so little to even tax. What else holds up our world isn’t even in the economic halls of Atlas fame, it is Mothers & Fathers who don’t get paid and are helped less and less for rearing our human world, it is all the charity workers & volunteer workers who work for little or nothing to hold humanity thread’s aloft. It is all the artists who speak to our hearts & minds and reflect on our existence back into us, our joy & hardship of ‘Being There’ outside of all economic growth & concerns, their buisness is just about the infinate mirror of life & they expect & receive mostly little or no reward for themselves. Holding up our world are all of us empathetic everyday human beings including the ‘un employed’ the ‘homeless’ who like so many other unsung heroes of our economic orphanages do so much of human good each day that isn’t counted as of any value monetarily but they do it anyway because they have a sovereign dignity valued within themselves to generously give to the conscious living spirit that connects us all!
So then. Let us dare before its to late to: Ask not what your country can do for corporations, ask what corporations can do for your country! We need governments to act together for us the rule of the people to lay down rules & taxes the corporation’s controllers must obey & pay if they wish to operate on earth & employ its citizens to create a profit.
Let us clearly define our battle’s words, by flipping the powerfull’s words & calling for all the good austerity can achieve in taxing the rich and turning the economic system right side up. Significantly raising wages as an inescapable cost of doing business. With increased taxes on freewheelin’ corporations all the deficits would not exist. Smaller businesses and society s welfare in all its forms could be increased & fulfilled not cut back. The economic crises is a direct result of things like Reaganomics where the big businesses wanted and succeeded in getting governments to let them take Too Much profit & payback less & less of even modest taxes. Right side up austerity is about putting people on top of participation in a democracy of their lives, Letting their work be a chosen growth in what is good and of use, not growth for growths sake at expense of society, the environment & peoples jobs health & lives.
I am against ‘Upside Down Austerity’ I want it right side up.
Here is a photo I took last November in the rain as I walked under Padraig Pearse streets bridge in Dublin City, Ireland. As all the people hurried past to their obligations thru’ the wet streets I saw hundreds of birds completely wrapped in attention & congregation around this ‘homeless man’. He didn’t look up as I photographed him in this moment but he smiled like an Irish Buddha, I then walked to the GPO to look for inspiration for some art I could make to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising. At the GPO I saw the beautiful sculpture of Cuchulainn there & on his shoulder is the big crow bird that it was said ‘only when the bird landed on his shoulder did the Irish heroe’s gathered host of enemies dare to believe that he was dead’. I thought to myself, I must do a new Cuchulainn for todays Ireland & as I started to jot down notes on the one scrap of paper I had I realised the words where intersecting with what I had written half an hour previously after encountering the Birdman of Pearse street bridge. THen the heart of it joined for me in inspiration I had just photographed Cuchulainn himself half an hour ago, alive & well though our Republic is far from fulfilled, hope in life emerges to feed all the birds justly, in defiance of the rumors of his demise!
This photo and a larger mural I have created from it is titled: ‘ Cuchulainn is Not Dead ! ‘
I sent it in as part of my proposal with my other bigger ambitious but properly costed ideas to the Arts Council’s Open Call to artists to commemorate the 1916 Centenary Year, but my C.V. was in the wrong place on my submission and my Idea had a choice of costs they could go for as they wished not one single rigid ultimatum, so I was informed it was never even passed on to be seen by the panel.
Well here it is anyway!
(P.S. I gave the Man in my photo the 5 euro I had, I paid my Tax!)
-Antonio
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