Kaiser wrote:
Thanks for sharing wake up.
One things that strikes me is that the minimum wage and cost of living/inflation have worked together to turn a majority of unskilled jobs and some skilled work these days into a prison sentence anyway. I think prison is where they have us already its just a sliding scale of how poor you are really, I hope in years to come we dont elect to go to prison for a bit of a break from 60 hour working weeks just to pay taxes and rent and maybe eat some scraps out there.. Of course you can wake up and opt out
I just saw a bit of Question Time, which I never, ever, ever watch. But there was a short discussion on benefit. And the argument was "there are people on benefit who get more money than people who work". And there was one well meaning guy from The Independent who actually made some good points during the programme about Israel in particular, and he made some good points on this as well, but not one person pointed out to me what should be obvious.
Everyone was saying that it was scandalous that many people work for less than others receive on benefit. Yet the solution to this is to lower the amount of money benefit claimants receive. How about improving labour conditions? How about raising the minimum wage by 50%? How is more destitute, desperate people going to help? People are poorly paid, so what's the solution? Well, it can't be raising wages because these are set naturally by 'the market', of course. We'd better hammer the doleys and hope that this makes people feel better about themselves.
It's ridiculous that millions of people work for a pittance doing things that they hate and have absolutely no say in their working conditions whatsoever. But we've been steadily trained to accept this and ignore the fact that if you work 20 hours per week in Starbucks you have to pay Income Tax, but Starbucks who have shops in every town in the Western world pay nothing! And scapegoat the doleys instead. Or the druggies. Or the immigrants. In America, it's the 'liberals' or the 'conservatives' fault. Or it's this political party's fault, or the other one, and when the other one gets back into power they'll put it right by passing this law or that law. Any solution or source of blame is fine, as long as you don't get anywhere near looking at the real one.
