feather wrote:
https://toys.usvsth3m.com/iain-duncan-smiths-realistic-unemployment-simulator/
There's likely a sequel in the pipeline where you nick food because you've been sanctioned, then get sent to jail where you're mandated to work for a Torymate for 57p per month before tax and insurance deductions.
Where DID all the jobs suddenly disappear to?
Cunts
This is really it, what you're seeing is the criminalisation and corporatisation of the poor because it's the best way of making them into economically productive units. There is some discussion of this here:
www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm
Of course, things have got far, far worse since then, with the private prison system now one of the few growing industries in the United States (and becoming more powerful in Britain).
If you look at the state of the economy today, you can easily identify the powerful and growth sectors:
Resource dominating corporations
Banking and financial sector fraud
Private prison system and related infrastructure
Sophisticated NSA-style surveillance programmes
Various government progammes - run by the private sector - which fulfill the basic state agenda
All of these things, with the possible exception of the banking sector, have one thing in common. They don't require skilled or well-paid workers, and they're targeted at the poorest people in society.
There are some corporations that only deal with other industrial partners, but most want to dominate the domestic market, and big chains that typically target these markets - Wal-Mart, Tesco, E-on, etc - employ millions of people in boring, completely unfulfilling, dead-end jobs that pay really poorly.
Most banks have a retail arm, and they want the average man and woman in the street to be in hock to them.
Overwhelmingly, poor people are those that are locked up in prison, and you don't get too many wealthy people working in them.
Surveillance is targeted at everyone except the rich.
Pretty much all government programmes are targeted at the poor, except taxation, which is targeted at everyone except the rich.
Eventually, all these individual sectors come to be dependent on one another - aside from the fact that the same powerful interests tend to invest in them all, anyway. An obvious example of this is pointed out in the Chomsky link; private prisons needs prisoners, so they need to criminalise a section of society, so drugs are demonised in order to lock up drug users, and this justifies a 'War on Drugs', which enables a vast state-run snooping system to be created, which can then be used for surveillance, and then the private prison system becomes reliant on these people being locked up, so they want more, so the 'War on Drugs' is extended, and then the corporations that are running that become bigger and demand more, and at the same time companies are exploiting prison labour, and they want more of that...and so it goes on.
And that's just one example, you have all these ties in many other areas, sectors and industries as well. Eventually these interests dominate society, and there is no legitimate role for millions of people, and this commingled structure doesn't want to pay them and doesn't need to. That's when you unveil the work programme. And that's where we are now.
