Poverty – Page 4 – Prog Gold

Tories say: trust people, but not with money

Published on July 6, 2009

Red Toryism apparantly is taking the worst of New Labour paternalism and combine it with the worst kind of …erm… New Labour free market fetishism, if two recent trail balloons — aid vouchers for people in poor countries to spent on private schools and investment vouchers for the poor in the UK, paid for by the sale of the nationalised banks to make them into “asset investors” — are anything to go by. So much for fresh new ideas from Cameron.

If you genuinely want to give poor people control over how to spent the money to get them out of poverty, give them the money directly, don’t arse about with bloody vouchers. But if you give them money you can’t control what they do with it and they might actually spend it on the wrong things. They might even buy …cigarettes. What’s more, vouchers are like company scrip, only redeemable through approved venues, another way to channel money supposed to help the poor into the pockets of your business friends.

The best way to lift people up out of poverty is by giving them money. Sure, some no doubt will fuck up, but they do so already and the thing about fucking up is, it matters less if you have more money (and are safely middle class) as we all know. I know I’ve made mistakes, but none of them could doom me, as I had money and more importantly, my parents had the money and connections to shelter me from my mistakes.

You Say ASBO, I Say Eugenics

Published on November 7, 2008

The Dutch Labour party have placed a bill before parliament that would force women judged ‘unfit mothers’ to take court-ordered contraception:

Women in the Netherlands deemed “unfit mothers” may soon be forced to take contraception, if a draft bill currently before the Dutch parliament is passed. The bill “targets women who have been the subject of judicial intervention due to their bad parenting,” says its author, a member of the Netherlands’ socialist Labour Party.

Under the proposed legislation, a woman judged unfit who refuses to take contraception and becomes pregnant would have her child taken away at birth. The infant then would be placed in a foster home.

[…]

Disabled mothers already face a worldwide uphill battle for the right to bear children. Earlier this year, “K.E.J.,” a woman with developmental disabilities, was taken to court by her own aunt, who wanted K.E.J. to be sterilized against her will. K.E.J. won her court battle. But would a woman with similar disabilities be judged unfit under the proposed Dutch system? What about a woman who could not care for a child due to a mental illness like post-partum depression, but who has entered a treatment program and wants to try again?

The bill does not appear to include any prohibitions against discrimination based on disability, except that parents who have not yet raised a child and been judged unfit based on the way in which they parented that child would not be affected. Therefore, women would not be put on court-ordered contraception before having their first child.

More…

Crisis Casualties, No.2

Published on October 5, 2008

So zillionaires are losing billions. How very sad. Oh, how my heart bleeds.

London, Oct 5 (PTI) NRI steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has lost 16.6 billion pounds in the global credit crunch owing to plummeting stock markets in the last four months, media reports said here today.
The 58-year-old Mittal heads a list of ten super-rich losers who together have seen their share portfolios shrink by about 23 billion pounds from their peaks, The Sunday Times claimed.

Another NRI entrepreneur Anil Agarwal, who built up his metals empire, has seen his stock plummet by 2.7 billion pounds.

The height of Mittal’s losses dwarfs those of others in the list of top 10 losers, which include Mike Ashley, the beleaguered owner of Newcastle United football club and the retailer Sports Direct.

Mittal has seen his family’s stake in ArcelorMittal, the steel conglomerate, fall from 33.24 billion pounds on June 4 this year to 16.63 billion pounds at the close of Friday’s markets. The loss is equivalent to 137 million pounds a day or nearly 6 million pounds an hour.

The credit crunch losses were established by comparing the value of shareholdings around the world held by them at their peak with the value at the close of markets last Friday. PTI

All very sad for them, the poor penurious preciouses – but I doubt very much any one of them will do without food to put money on his electric or gas meter key this winter.

A People’s Recession

Published on September 18, 2008

I am so very tempted to wallow in schadenfreude over banking job losses in the City and New York: it’s about time the bloated parasites amongst us had a dose of the real economy most of us live in.

Hurrah, hurrah and let’s dance on the corpse of capitalism!!

No – although there’ll be a limited number of brash loadsamoneys and well-connected double-barrelled investment analysts to laugh at down the DSS (and, I fervently hope, a fair few personal fortunes wiped out) the people who did this won’t really suffer.

Unless they’re really stupidly overextended, they’ll have a cushion. All they’ll need to do is cash up what they can, buy a nice little forecliosed cottage in Cornwall or Vermont (with organic smallholding, naturally) and ride out the financial and social storm. They can finally write that novel, you know?

As always it’s the small fry who suffer, from call-centrre operators and cleaners to copier technicians and security guards to the external consultants to the sysadmins to trainee lawyers at corporate firms to the florist who comes to do the orchids in the boardroom.

This is the harsh financial reality British banking economy workers will face when their redundancy money – such as it is, Labour never changed those stingy Thatcherite rules on workers’ rights – runs out and they find it necessary to sign up for benefits:

Contribution-based Jobseeker’s Allowance
Person aged 16-17: £47.95
Person aged 18-24: £47.95
Person aged 25 or over: £60.50
Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance

Personal allowances – single people Rate
Person aged 16-17: £47.95
Person aged 18-24: £47.95
Person aged 25 or over: £60.50

Personal allowances – couple Rate
Both aged 16-17: £47.95
Both aged 16/17, one disabled: £47.95
Both aged 16/17, with responsibility for a child: £72.35
One aged 16/17, one aged 18-24: £47.95
One aged 16/17, one aged over 25: £60.50
Both aged 18 or over: £94.95

Lone parents Rate
Aged 16-17: £47.95
or depending on their circumstances: £47.95
Aged 18 or over: £60.50

Dependent children Rate
Payable from birth up to the day before their 20th birthday: £52.59

There’s housing benefit too, but only if you’re renting – and if you’re single and under 25 and don’t have children, then it’s paid only at the local market rate for a single room; that docklands bachelor pad’ll have to go.

If you have a mortgage, prepare to lose your house. If you’re over 45 and wondering how long it’ll take to get a new job, ask a former miner. Say goodbye to your tenuous grip on the middle-class, welcome to the underclass. Goodbye cosy Metroland, hello Morlockia.

I think the Daily Mail and its readership may be changing their tune on benefit scroungers in the very near future.

Cut From The Frozen North To The Tropics…

Published on September 12, 2008

While the UK and US media are having a happy happy fun time decidering the election and the actual electorate gets more and more irate about it, banana republicanism and all round diplomatic skullduggery goes on as blithely as usual. In this particular instance, Venezuela, it may have electoral implications – but perhaps that’s the plan.

The supposedly lame-duck Bush administration is continuing to destabilise neighbouring countries for fun and profit by fomenting dissent and plotting coups:

President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.

Chávez also ordered Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. “Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees,” he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.

The move came a day after Venezuela’s ally Bolivia expelled its US ambassador for allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters; turmoil which claimed eight lives and split the country in two.

[…]

In a day of intrigue and brinkmanship, Chávez announced that Venezuelan military officers had plotted to assassinate him with US complicity. “They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia. That’s enough shit from you Yankees,” he said.

Ties would be restored when the US had a new government that “respected” Latin America, he added.

Coincidental or not, his accusation fell on the 35th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup which replaced Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The American diplomatic and security apparatus has learned precisely nothing from Chile. They think that it’s still the 1970s in South America: the cold war has never ended there for them.

It’s all beginning to look rather Georgian, or even Bay of Pigsian, isn’t it, what with the Russian navy conducting war games off the coast of Venezuela and Russian bombers at South American bases and everyone taking sides:

Russian bombers arrive in Venezuela

Russia has flown two long-range bombers to Venezuela for military exercises, a move likely to cause concern in Washington.

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said on Wednesday that the Tu-160 strategic bombers had arrived to strengthen military ties and to counter US regional influence.

Apart from the larger geopolitical political implications there are domestic US electoral considerations too, in light of the bellicose attitude being expressed shown by McCain/ Palin towards Russia. United against a common enemy and all that…

The Bush administration definitely seems to have a strategy; it’s armageddon or bust. Trouble in South America, the Caucasus, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan -any one of of those situations could ripen into regional and perhaps global war, given the right sequence of events. Surely one’s got to pay off in time to give the Republicans a pre- election boost.

Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of October Surprise to all this?