The accumulation of wealth for its own sake is responsible for poverty because it is unnatural and false. It is anti-life.
Human kind are the only creatures who have this imposed false narrative of being, every other creature and, indeed, most humans, merely want enough and having enough will get on and do other things, like play, raising young, exploring, being creative, home building of whatever. Obsessing on grasping an excess of wealth is not just sick, it’s stupid and makes no sense, whereas the constant worry when beaten down by the violence of poverty is both reasonable and inevitable.
There is a reason why poverty is not some moral, ethical or genetic failure in poor people and is, in fact, violence. Poverty is the inevitable consequence of the polarisation and accumulation of obscene wealth into the hands of a very small number of people who use it to dictate economic policy and dictate the terms of life and living of the vast majority of people. Poverty exists because it is allowed to exist by the very people who could do something about it, which requires just one example to make perfectly clear.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has accumulated $110.7 billion from his business dealings which includes hiring people for less money than they need to live on and imposing brutal employment conditions, including employees having to urinate in bottles [1] [2]. His plan for his wealth, or ‘winnings’ as he puts it, is astonishing, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel, I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that. [3]” What he calls ‘my Amazon winnings’ and ‘my financial lottery winnings’, are in fact profits from the exploitation of others. He could pay all his employees a living wage, at the very least, but he chooses not to, and such an imposition of poverty pay is violence against the lives and families of the people he employs. He can think of no use on Earth for his obscene wealth so he plans to literally blast it into space.
It is a measure of the strength of the narrative of wealth which is drummed into us every day that there is almost no public outcry at either his greed nor his irresponsible use of his ill gotten resources by spunking them into space.
These resources are considered to be owned by Bezos, when in reality they are earth resources, including the fruits of peoples’ labour, that he has extracted and accumulated from others. He may have a sharp business mind, but when your business is built on exploiting others, then basically, you are just a greedy shit. There is nothing laudable or admirable about stealing from those you force to live in poverty.
Poverty is violence. How many times have I said it and how many more times must it be said?
I’ve lived in and around poverty all my life. It beats like a drum inside me, a war drum of violence.
It is astonishing that the right to life is supposedly a human right but not the means of survival. Across the world roughly 25,000 people die of hunger every day, that’s 9.1 million starved to death a year [4]. The right to life ‘means that nobody, including the Government, can try to end your life. It also means the Government should take appropriate measures to safeguard life by making laws to protect you and, in some circumstances, by taking steps to protect you if your life is at risk [5]. The proliferation of food banks across Britain means that the government is committing crimes against life by creating the circumstances in which millions of people are starving [6].
Wealth and the lack of any wealth is used as a means of control. Money, a human contrivance for trade, is a weapon of mass control and the most successful weapon of mass destruction. To hold life in such contempt is one of the greatest human failings, lacking in imagination, vision and respect and love for nature and for this beautiful yet fragile gift of life.
Is it any wonder that people on social media share pictures and videos of nature, babies, kittens and puppies and stories of human kindness? They are often mocked for sentimentalism yet such pictures and videos are used as a respite from hardship and suffering and as a reminder of the better side of human nature in a world riven by human made strife, death and destruction.
Since 2010 Britain has been in the grip of the most brutal economic warfare in which hundreds of thousands of people have died prematurely [8] [9].
Britain is among the top 10 of the wealthiest nations on earth and the big question is, what good is that doing us, the millions of ordinary people living precariously and/or in poverty [10]? The answer is none. Few of us have any access to wealth.
For the last three years I have been scrimping and saving, not least in wearing clothes until they fall off me and exercising great care in what I buy, including food and household goods. In that time I have managed to save £1,800 which amounts to just over a months cost of living, including rent, council tax, utilities and all household expenses. Why have I done this? Because I do not trust the government not to steal my pension and because UK pensions are the lowest of all the most advanced economies in the world and even as a pensioner I have to rely on benefits and the Tories have torn away the economic security of all ordinary people in Britain. We live on sufferance and that sufferance has been removed from millions of people and we have people dying on the streets. If people are managing, what they may not know is how fragile that is until it hits them like a ton of bricks as and when they become economically insecure for whatever reason.
To be reduced to thinking about life in terms of economic security and little or nothing else is a crime against our humanity. That isn’t living, that is barest, meanest, survival from which all the vast richness of life has been stripped away. That is unforgivable!
Of all the things that I have done and value most in life, the pursuit of wealth has nothing to do with any of it. The government narrative of earning our way when nothing could be further from the truth is the most despicable confidence trick being played out nationally (and globally). Work doesn’t pay, benefits don’t pay and pensions don’t pay enough to live on, why not? The government has stolen it all from us and reduced Britain to catastrophic chaos, where neighbour fights neighbour, the streets of every town and city have people living and dying in the most precarious circumstances.
All of this false narrative and the destruction of life and our quality of life is at the hands of a government which has successfully shut down parliament to prevent the duty of parliament to govern in our name and to cause the maximum harm to the people of Britain.
We the people need to take back control and that has nothing to do with our membership or otherwise of the European Union and everything to do with the betrayal of a cabal of millionaires dedicated to the pursuit of personal greed and self aggrandizement at our expense.
For our lives, for our children’s lives, for the love of life and for the adventure that is life, it is now the duty of each of us to resist and oppose the destruction of society which Thatcher began and which the current government of despots are so avariciously seeking to finish off in a process of eugenics hitherto unthinkable in any civilised human being.
The government has deliberately failed us and sold our lives short. Where we go from here is anybodies guess but at the very least it must include the destruction of the Tory party.
Keith Ordinary Guy. 10 September 2019.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-peak-2019-2?r=US&IR=T
[4] https://www.creditdonkey.com/world-hunger-statistics.html
[5] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-2-right-life
[7] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/timeline-of-20th-and-21st-century-wars
[10] https://fullfact.org/economy/uk-worlds-5th-or-9th-largest-economy/
[11] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42236328
