My new book now available!

EVIL AT THE HEART OF CAPITALISM

Daniel Miles in conversation with Karl Gruber
ISBN 9781291914825

Capitalism is in crisis! People are suffering, and the natural world is going to hell in a handcart.

So long as they can get what they want, the richest 1% seems prepared to trash the environment and make others sacrifice anything. The whole purpose of civilisation has been bent to serve the interests of their Profit Machine, and we, the 99%, are pressed into service like slaves to keep their Profit Machine working.

With increasing virulence, the capitalist system hunts down and demonises its scapegoats, blaming its victims for the horrors that it heaps upon them – the unemployed, the sick and disabled, the single parent – none are safe from its vile attacks.

With unrestrained furious indignation, Daniel Miles, philosopher and activist, and Karl Gruber, maverick Christian minister, join in a quest to challenge the bad ideas that have led to the present global economic and social crises. Their target is capitalism itself.

From one key evil, the exploitation of the individual, all the other evils of our time flow forth in a sickening torrent. Only with the end of capitalism can we hope for an end to this evil.

* * *

For the Print version, please visit Lulu.com http://bit.ly/1qxbZUR

(These links will open a new window.)

When the ISBN system has made the book generally available everywhere, I will re-post this blog (should be a few weeks).

In the meanwhile, for the paperback and the Kindle version, please visit Amazon in the UK http://amzn.to/1omDcDu

or if you are in the USA go to Amazon.com for the paperback http://amzn.to/VMrmvS, or the Kindle version http://amzn.to/1vvme9U


If you would like a free paperback copy for review please email me with your mailing address.
danielmiles@hmamail.com
or write to me at
Daniel Miles
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX
UK

Posh Boys Don’t Worry About Breaking the Law

Yes, as we would expect, it’s one rule for them, and one rule for the rest of us plebs. They don’t just hold us in contempt, they want to show to the world loudly and clearly that they can’t stand us, and by heaven, they sure as hell aren’t going to follow the rules that the rest of us are expected to abide by.

Vitriol aside (only for a moment, don’t worry), there is a serious point demonstrated by this rude behaviour: they live in a different world, the world of wealth, privilege, power, and relish the suffering of the people they cause to, well, suffer. They matter, and we don’t. Common decency and courteous behaviour are all that, ultimately, bind our society as a place where we would want to live. Not for posh boys. It’s their society, to do with as they will. And as for decency, well, the decent person is the servant who does what they are told. And servants don’t have feelings. They are hardly human at all.

And their offences (nearly forgot)?

George Osborne allowed his chauffeur-driven £50,000 Land Rover to be parked in a Disabled Bay, reserved for Blue Badge holders, on two occasions! At an M4 service station, and a week earlier at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

And David Cameron allowed his chauffeur-driven Jaguar to be parked in a restricted zone for three hours, when the sign states that parking is for 30 minutes only.

A disabled driver who fails to display their Blue Badge gets a fine. George Osborne and David Cameron posh boys in their magic cloaks of invincible privilege get to have a laugh at the common people who get a right and proper telling-off for being naughty.

To see George Osborne’s car parked in a Disabled Bay at an M4 service station, click here.

To see David Cameron's car parked in a restricted zone, click here. 

SOURCES:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-parks-disabled-bay-1812379
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-parked-another-disabled-1814506
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-causes-outrage-parking-1816145

Open Letter to David Cameron – This Immorality Shames You

Dear Prime Minister,

Immoral targetting of disabled people

I would like to protest at the unjust and cruelly vindictive bedroom tax which you have imposed on 660,000 households in publicly rented housing across the country, up to two-thirds of which are estimated to include a disabled member. This measure, along with others, constitutes a deliberate and purposeful targetting of disabled people, people for whom life is a struggle in any event, and people who are vulnerable in a variety of ways.

It is hardly credible that a normal human being with the usual sort of moral sense would for a moment consider enacting such cruelty. What you are doing is unconscionable.

Your policies, and you as individual person, are in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (ratified by the United Kingdom in 1951, and fully incorporated into UK law with the Human Rights Act 1998).

You have breached Article 1 of the Declaration: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

You are not acting in a spirit of brotherhood. Indeed, your policies, and the general approach of your government, have been to demonise and stigmatise all social security claimants and people who through no fault of their own cannot be productive in terms of earning a wage, yet of course contribute to the social and cultural life of this nation in many ways.

You are in breach of Article 25(1): “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

On a continuing daily basis, even before the new changes to social security took effect in April 2013, we hear accounts of how more and more people have to attend food banks even to maintain a basic standard of sustenance, and this being so, clearly social security support is not adequate for some people. (One of your responses has been to blame such people for their own plight as a result of frittering away their money on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling, a claim that would be just laughable if it were not also shamefully false.)

By uprating most benefits by only 1%, at less than the rate of inflation, you have effectively cut social security payments for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Considering that our nation is one of the richest in the world, this can only be considered as a deliberate act of malice, a policy whose known and intended result is increased suffering for people least able to bear it.

Your claim that you need to “make hard choices” is bizarrely spurious in the extreme, and your talk of the “need to reduce the deficit” is nothing more than a smoke-screen designed to bamboozle the economically ignorant whom you are treating with contempt and derision. Any need to alter the fiscal arrangements of this country can easily be accommodated without harming poor and vulnerable people, not least by dealing with the scandals of tax avoidance and the grotesque levels of bonuses paid to bankers, and most certainly by introducing a just and progressive income tax system.

I am able to test your moral bankruptcy by predicting that before you read this sentence you were already laughing contemptuously and dismissively at this letter. If you lack moral integrity, others do not; and the people of this fine land will find ways to challenge your harmful influence. I for one will be working to vote you out at the next election.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Miles

SOURCES:

Law Observer

http://www.lawobserver.co.uk/human_rights_27.html

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Purposeful stigmatisation of social security claimants (many other sources could also be cited)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/05/goverment-loaded-language-welfare

Food Banks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/27/london-food-poverty-fears-grow
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/mar/31/britain-day-of-shame-welfare

Poor People – the Factual Facts

Please go here, to find out about the report on Truth and Lies about Poverty

where, as you go down the page, you will find a wonderfully funny video called Poor People – the Factual Facts

This link should take you straight to the video if you don't want to do any reading first.

Download the full report Truth and lies about poverty

Feel the Cruelty, But Laugh in their Faces

I have just found this, which has momentarily lifted my Tory-induced despair.

How to Wage War on the Poor

[By “bullingdonmorons”, comment in a blog post at The Guardian 21/03/2013]*

Probably the most disgusting thing about this coalition has been their propaganda war against the most disadvantaged people in society. By the deliberate spreading of lies, they have facilitated a systematic assault upon the poor, the sick and the disabled. And they have knowingly misled the public for one simple reason, to enable them to totally dismantle the welfare state.

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are lying Tory bastards.

The welfare state has led to a ‘something for nothing’ culture?

It may be utterly repugnant to hear millionaire politicians who have never worked a day in their life telling us that they are ending the ‘something for nothing culture’, but it’s also utter bollocks. Only 2.5% of the total welfare budget of £200 billion actually goes on unemployment, whilst the vast majority of unemployed claimants have worked, and paid taxes, for years and are now on benefits due to redundancy, sickness, disability or having to care for someone. Millions more are receiving benefits due to poverty wages. The Welfare State is actually a massive state subsidy to business which enables it to pay poverty wages and charge exorbitant rents.

Living on benefits is a lifestyle choice?

Only 0.1% of benefit claimants who have claimed for 10 years or more are actually unemployed. Less than 5,000 people, out of over 9 million 16–64-year-olds who don’t work, have been on Job Seekers Allowance for more than 5 years. Less than 0.1% of the 20 million working age households have two generations that have never had a permanent job. Despite strenuous efforts, researchers have been unable to find any families where three generations have never worked.

People won’t work because benefits are too high?

In 1971, JSA equalled 20.9% of the average wage. Today, it is worth 10.9%. These people are living in poverty. There are 8.5 million people receiving benefits in this country. There are more people in work who get benefits than not working. The majority of all housing benefit claimants are in work. 6.1 million people classed as living in poverty are from households in work.

People on housing benefit live in mansions?

Our newspapers continuously bombard us with these stories. There are around five million claimants of Housing Benefit; of which there were five families who received over £100,000 per year, all living in central London. The average award of Housing Benefit is approximately £85 a week. Only 3% of families received more than £10,000 a year support, and 0.04% received more than £30,000 a year. And no one ever mentions that housing benefit goes straight to the landlord and not the claimant. And those large families screwing the taxpayer? There are around 130 families with 10 children and only 10 families with 12 children in the whole country who are on benefits.

Benefit cheats are bankrupting the country?

Benefit fraud amounts to about £1.5 billion a year, less than 1% of the entire budget. To put this in perspective, the bank bailout equalled 1,000 years of benefit fraud. Meanwhile, £1.3 billion gets underpaid each year and a further £16 billion goes unclaimed every year.

We can no longer afford the welfare state?

So who is really bankrupting the country? Well, the richest 1,000 people now possess £414 billion between them, a sum more than three times the size of the entire UK budget deficit. The richest 1% of the population are estimated to possess wealth of about £1 trillion. The richest 10% control wealth of about £4 trillion. The Quantitative Easing programme has increased the personal wealth of the UK’s richest 20% by enough to pay for Job Seeker’s Allowance for the next 100 years.

The people of this country are being shafted, but instead of the blame being directed at the real culprits, the rich, it is being aimed at the most vulnerable, the poor, with our own Government shamelessly leading the way.

And every one who believes their bullshit should hang their heads in shame.


*I have not been able to find this post where it was originally uploaded at the Guardian site. The version I repost here is from this page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/30/poverty-benefits-not-lifestyle-choice#comment-22350064
The piece has also been reposted at Sue Marsh’s blog, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger:
http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/why-wont-dwp-really-meet-spartacus.html#comment-form

The facts included here in this reposted piece are downright astonishing. It is not the budget for the Welfare State that is out of control, but the Tory-led government itself whose overarching immortality needs to be exposed and expunged from political life.

Alas, I have not been able to verify the original sources for these facts, and I will be happy to include amendments, alternations and acknowledges as necessary, if anyone can send me details of the sources. Please use the comments feature on this blog to send me as much information as possible. Or please just comment in the usual way, to add your own thoughts and personal experiences to this blog. God Help Us All.

Tories Target Poorest and Sickest

We now have clear evidence of the outrageous immorality of Tory policy in its drive to protect the richest in society at the expense of the poorest and the most vulnerable, not just in the sense that the poor will be a bit poorer than they were before, but in the sense that the poor will be made to suffer, to cringe at the nastiness of modern living as the Tory government is shaping it. And the government is doing this with wilful intent, purposefully finding ways to make the poorest and most vulnerable suffer.

Instead of making the tax system more fair, and taxing the richest people a little more – a mere slither of a little extra considered as a proportion of their massive wealth – the government has reduced the rate of income tax for the richest and will cut deeply into the incomes and services needed desperately by the sick and disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups.

And the cuts are going to slice deep. The government wants to ‘save’ £75.2 billion, and the areas being cut the most are social care and welfare.

In other words, the most vulnerable in society are being hunted down to pay the price for the failure of the capitalist system, for the incompetence of government, and the incompetence of the banks. And to satisfy the greed of the richest.

Using the government’s own figures, Dr Simon Duffy in his report A fair society? How the cuts target disabled people, published by the Campaign for a Fair Society, finds that:

Using the government’s own figures, it is clear that by 2015 ... benefits for disabled people and the poorest will ... have been cut by £18 billion, a cut of about 20%.

When we look at the combined impact of all the cuts we find:

• People in poverty (21% of the population) bear 39% of all cuts.

• Disabled people (8% of the population) bear 29% of all cuts.

• People with severest disabilities (2% of the whole population) bear 15% of all cuts.

Not only are the cuts in general being targeted at people in poverty, but there is a specific emphasis on targeting disabled people. You cannot argue against that sort of inhuman discrimination, because the person you are trying to argue with is plainly not open to, or not interested in rational argument.

The only explanation for this that makes any sense is to understand that Cameron, Osborne and the rest literally have something wrong with them. They are incapable of the normal sort of moral thinking that guides the daily lives of you and me. They display the psychology that we see in psychopaths, that is, people who literally do not have feelings for other people, but use them like insensible objects, as resources for their own self-serving schemes.


SOURCE

http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/uploads/attachment/354/a-fair-society.pdf