Chapter: Something. - New Places etc.

Good evening everyone,

Soon I'm going to start a new job but to be frank I'm still miserable as sin.
Some folks might go "But Mike, a job is a job, you are making money!"

The cost of living and building a future for citizens that live in the U.K is astounding. 
Unless you're earning over £18k+ a year I genuinely believe that no one is making money. We are simply covering our bills and saving what we can when we can until that car breaks or our teeth need fixing. (I'm trying to say "We gotta get angry folks".)

I remember a story about a father earning £14k and barely being able to provide for his family because of the current cuts. Despite working  full-time, his family could apply for help because the wages were not enough to cover the cost of living. Our welfare state is subsidising companies that are being too cheap to pay their staff a respectable wage. (What is a respectable wage? The kind of salary where you can stand on your own two feet and control your own life without financial assistance). This man has kids whilst working full time and the wages from essentially acting like a blood vessel for some company is tragic. If this is what happens to a full-time father what hope is there for future generations that are now entering the job market?

So many people keep this country functioning and allow this entire show to take place and are they getting their fair share? No.

We are engaged in a race to the bottom, in which as many functions will be given to as few a persons as humanely possible. Such a notion terrifies me. We are humans, not machines and yet we are expected to act like them until a machine is finally introduced that would make us all redundant anyway. 

I guess the irony here is the race to the bottom would squeeze wages so much that implementing such a machine would not be cost effective as you would have an army of drones fulfilling the functions that your company requires anyway. This is what happened during the British Industrial Revolution.

The fact that I can see all of this makes me sad, furious and cold.
The fact that people simply accept this reality because "A job is a job is a job is a job..." mantra seems to be so wide place.Why are people afraid to stand up and declare "I am human, I am not a machine, I have dreams and my function here won't help that".   


Never mind that the people taken off of the JSA and placed into workfare  are counted as employed, or those in sanctions are taken off the statistics too. Never mind the fact that entry level wages are going down lower and lower and our apprentice minimum wage is £2.60 an hour.
Never mind that kids are the future and this is the world we are going to give them.
Never mind that houses are gold dust and we haven't built enough.
Never mind  that the staff in the care homes are paid a pittance and when we sell our houses that we worked aeons for, the sell off won't cover the costs of our place in some care home. Never mind this race to the bottom for after all, a job is a job is a job.

I feel so sad (and angry) by all this.
I want to build a fort of duvets and hide from it all.

The trick is, find a job you love, hopefully one that will pay enough for you to build a future and you should be alright.  (That is as close as Britain comes to the American Dream.)

Yet many British folks do not have that. That is why UKIP, Britain First and hate is everywhere.
We are slaving off our asses, getting nowhere fast, the mere idea that someone could get something for nothing brings our blood to a fine boil. But it is easier to point the finger at an the vulnerable than to look at ourselves and accept that we have the power to change this world that we live on and it starts by changing how we interact with it.

Soon I will have hours around train times and I won't work on Fridays (but on Sundays).
This means I can finally practise my saxophone before 7pm on a weekday. ^___^

My main aim in life is to lift everything up. To try and raise everything higher.
People  tell me that you should only look out for yourself but the NHS, universal suffrage, equality, our social housing, free education and our justice system only came into being because our grandparents and their ancestors looked out for one another. I see no sense in standing tall and proud, all on my own, if the society around me crumbles to dust and becomes a mess of self interest and scape goating. 

Once upon a time my family had nothing, quite literally nothing. Everything that I have today is partly the result of my own determination but mostly because of the support given to me and the faith that folks have in me.  Maybe that is why our society has become selfish? Not as many people  believe in one another any more? I believe in people though, I think if we push ourselves and push others to give us a better deal then we can achieve a decent place in this world.

I think people are all a lot smarter than what they give themselves credit for.
If people are given the right support then anything is possible.

This ramble was a half blog by The Common Sense Eccentric.

Chapter: 15.5 - A Mad Ramble - On Tyranny, Best Men, Rent and Work Fallacies..

Rambling.

This is not a blog. It is an unconnected series of ideas, mad rambles and tangents.


Tyranny is a subject close to my heart. As a student I read about all sorts of state sanctioned madness more than a sane person should. I can safely say I have a keen understanding of the concept of Tyranny. If you are interested in what this means feel free to read on. The quickest answer to what makes someone a tyrant is that a tyrant is:

A figure of authority in a legal sense.
They act purely on self-interest.
They have no moral integrity. *

My original intention was not to write a book on tyranny but about the importance of voting in our modern age. However as my research progressed I realised that voting is no longer as powerful a tool as it used to be. Voting and votes are essentially purchased via misinformation and a bias media.. The main problem with voting is that once we have elected someone we have essentially given them a mandate to rule however they see fit. Britain does not have an actual constitution and so our politicians are free to pass whatever they wish. There are no real balances in place to prevent any abuses of power and the fact that old scandals dating back decades have only just come to light should be a sure sign that there are undoubtedly many things at hand that we are not being told about.  

The only thing keeping our MPs and political leaders in check is their moral integrity and peer pressure. (Don't choke) If the Iraq War is anything to go by we know that the moral integrity is bloody lacking and peer pressure led us off a cliff into a damn mess. 
The key difference between a good leader and a tyrant is that tyrants lack moral integrity.  "Moral integrity" is such a subjective term but there are instances when a human being demonstrates that they have none.  Any example that I offer would turn into an entirely separate blog. Y

In Britain we think of tyranny being something related to Stalin, the Third Reich or despots but tyranny is not always a bloodbath. Tyrants can have winning smiles for how else does someone hold onto power whilst robbing a nation blind?  <That link is about how George Osborne's best man made millions from the Royal Mail sell off and donated £500k to the Tories.

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Considering how much rent devours my income....I kinda wish I was allowed to buy the council house for £5k when they were sold off for that much. Sure I was a teenager but I will essentially have paid what the company spent on this house after 53 rent paying weeks. Why are the middle classes saddled with mortgages that shackle them to the land and their job until they get lucky or pay it all off whereas the company that owns my house have a free ride? In some cases it will be housing benefit that pays off the costs of purchasing the property. Essentially the state sells off an asset only to pay for it with the tax money. People are paying twice for the thing they are paying to live in. Especially if there are people claiming housing benefit in the first place within the house you live in on account of being the main earner. This is madness. Universal basic income would minimise paperwork. 29 pages to claim housing benefit. 29 PAGE FORM! The Housing Benefit in some cases is less than £30 a week. You can tell the state pays it workers without any care for efficiency and costs. How long would assessing a 29 page form take?
This is why the Green's idea of a Universal Basic income is superior to the other ideas on offer.
It would essentially force people to take responsibility of their own lives for they are being given the means to do so. 

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There is a work fallacy where we value people by their income or the job that they do yet the job that soemone does may not provide enough for them to grow as a person or family. The fact of the matter is this: The welfare cuts are hitting working families hardest.  Work is only worth as much it enables you develop yourself whether by saving up money so you can enter something else or by having programs in place that help you hone in your skills. The fact that a family can be working and receiving welfare means that their job is not paying enough. The state is essentially enabling companies to get away with paying workers low wages as the state will pick up where Scrooge McDuck does not!

Merely working for the sake of working is a modern form of mental bondage that hinders the nation as a whole. Workers that refuse to claim because our welfare system is a humilating process get punished for daring to be independent. At the Job Centre in Banbury I would sit and wait for my appointment with a member of staff whilst other claimants were interviewed IN FRONT OF ME. I saw staff laying into people for not doing enough, cutting their welfare and telling them to try harder. What sort of person kicks the crutch from under someone and demands that the person stand up straight? You are judged, it is a spectacle and nothing short of embarrassing. This frustration against the system and the world we live in however taken on on the immigrants or citizens from other ethnicities BUT the fact is that our system is purely a business model about squeezing as much out of someone for the lowest possible pay. This is why the retail environments have shifts all across the place, this is why people might be trainees for long after they've actually trained, this is why we have an apprentice minimum wage of £2.80 an hour!

Outside of the welfare state we see each generation being offered lower wages as they enter a job. We will recreate a bunch of working class people unaware of their powerlessness for they are wearing suits.

Thank you for reading.
I currently have no major blog plans in mind but I will continue to write.

The Common Sense Eccentric.

*I will find sauces and share those sources once I start writing it.