RSA animation (dubiously incomplete): Crises of Capitalism
While I spend the days idling on the beach in this blistering summer heat, swimming and wandering and generally taking life easy - as I've been doing since early June (and, basically, for the past two decades here down on the Costa del Sol, which the coastline that takes-in Hastings has become) - loads of other people are sweating and slaving in factories and offices and shops around the country (around the world, even) and are scarcely richer for all their effort...
I've already explained a couple of months back how we're all being massively ripped off as we struggle to feed the perennial insatiable extortionists: the Council-Tax office, rent-or-mortgage office, and superstore check-outs (the last two consistently turn vast £billions in profits, while Council Tax cripples us poor yet is essentially a free-ride for the wealthy - to whom a 'recession' is either an irrelevance or a boon).
Long ago (two decades +) when it dawned on me - in a more pronounced way than usual for a self-evident truth - that time happens only once (and life too if you're an atheist), I began contriving how I might organise my future so I could spend as little of it as possible doing what I preferred NOT to do... like getting-up in the morning and traipsing off to some slave-hole or other merely to receive, in exchange for my precious time, an income that would scarcely meet the demands of those extortion outfits.
Somehow, I became aware that however comfortable or amenable that slave-hole, however mesmerising, alluring, appealing it might be... and whatever social or other benefits it gave... it could never even begin to approach the quality of NOT being condemned to its clutches. Even for the most Utopian day-prison - where the more pleasant it is, the more insidious - what could be a more futile and meaningless use of time? Albeit only part-time, one is still held within its 'straightjacket' so that the rest of one's life is forced into a certain order.
The sole exception, perhaps, is direct involvement in the CREATIVE ARTS or SCIENCES - though even these form a slave-hole if you fail to remain awake... ie, are not directly involved (and who'd want to remain awake if not directly involved?).
So now to the point:
After the colossal 'planned and brilliantly executed ' so-called BANK CRISIS, together with ongoing '$TRILLION WARS' - both of which are designed (yes, designed) - alongside ludicrous projects like Trident - to impoverish and keep-to-heel us riff-raff while further enriching the elite (via their investors/speculators; ie, banks etc... in the case of wars: arms-industry investors.. banks again)... after all that, are we to be ripped-off again by yet another of thier scams?
This time they're calling it a RECESSION... or better: double-dip RECESSION - sometimes (aptly) DEPRESSION - as in the following quote, which is in reply to an ICH article entitled 'Why The Great Depression Still Lies Ahead' where the author ingenuously assumes government is at pains to minimise the recession:
I really get tired of articles like this. I am not disagreeing with the substance of what is said just the idea that the government wants to keep us from a depression. It is my belief that the government is trying to cause a depression. If you start with that premise then the policies they are pursuing make perfect sense. With a depression everyone's wages can be cut so corporate profits can be maintained. There will be plenty of young men available to fight Imperialist wars around the world. Social Security can be eliminated as well as Medicare. The U.S. will be back in the perfect world of the 18th century with a wealthy few at the top ( the aristocracy) and the masses scrambling to care for themselves at subsistence level wages. The masses will be luxuriating in their independence from government doing anything for them. They will revel in pulling themselves up by their boot straps. How exhilarating it will be to wake up every day not knowing where your next meal may come from. America will really be the envy of the world. What a wonderful conclusion to this experiment in democracy. We will have discovered that man is incapable of evolving beyond the ruthless theft and destruction that has been the hallmark of the past. War, murder, torture, starvation, theft these are the ignoble attributes of America. Let's really show the world what we can do.
This, essentially, reflects my own observations. Whatever we are told, the opposite is most probably the truth.
One has only to focus on the Afghanistan Invasion: reflect on the spin over the years - yet the resistance there predominates... as is inevitable (like in 1940s occupied France). You can't win a whole population by force - ever - unless you want to massacre most of them. The imperialists know this; they continue the sham and propaganda anyway. Why? I'll tell you why: Because of the £$TRILLIONS involved... and mineral deposits... see how Blair has already personally made a reputed £20million from Iraqi oil. However....
A RECESSION should be an excellent and very desirable development - if only the victims were the $100billions multinationals (ie, all outfits with assets above a certain value and/or turning a healthy profit), the several million 'elite' estate owners in the UK, billionaire fund-managers and the rest of the City... instead of the vast mass of slaving poor who do all the real work AND take the brunt of every economic down-turn the elite decide to engineer whenever they feel inclined to bring the more ambitious of their slaves back down a peg or two...
To realise that those frequently-stupendously wealthy outfits (ie, see how BP boasts that $20bn for clean-up is nothing to them) would be little affected if it was they who were made to cough-up instead of their hapless slave-workers - is sobering. But not only should they be forced to cover for a reversal of all social-security 'cuts', etc. but to retract also on what is usually their impact on the planet, which because of them is going under with all this stuff and pollution these outfits continue to churn out - together with endless adverts and propaganda to get us naive plebs endlessly consuming their (what is mostly) trash that keeps this insane economic system ticking, or worse: GROWING... Phew!
Living in relative freedom as I do, slightly above the breadline here in the UK's Costa del Sol is - as I see it - infinitely preferable to any alternative time-hoover slaving 'employment' however lucrative or otherwise 'rewarding' (distracting?). I'm astounded that more people don't do likewise. I've tried the working life, and I suppose it was all very fine for a decade or two until... well, I was tied-up until almost 1990. Then I woke. Now, I continually ask: What was the point? Wake-up!
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SEE ALSO (from WSWS):
Perspective
Congress went on its July 4th vacation after depriving well over one million unemployed people of jobless benefits, shifting tax burdens from Wall Street to the working class, and ensuring that the dirty war in Afghanistan continues to escalate.
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..............JULYprevious update: JUNE 