Is it curtains for Trust?

[gurusid]

Hi folks,

Its curtains for ‘trust’:

Listening to a recent Newsnight programme on benefit cuts (welfare is a third of government spending), the issue of trust came up and on its disappearance in society, how there was a ‘hardening’ of opinion against people on welfare for instance, exemplified by Chancellor Osbourne’s image of the worker rising in the morning to see a pair of drawn curtains across the street and being reminded of the lazy welfare dependant lying behind them, that their taxes are paying for; never mind the real reasons for the curtains being drawn..

“…We also think it’s unfair that when that person leaves their home early in the morning, they pull the door behind them, they’re going off to do their job, they’re looking at their next-door neighbour, the blinds are down, and that family is living a life on benefits. That is unfair as well, and we are going to tackle that as part of tackling this country’s economic problems.”

Social capital has been eroding steadily as the inequality between rich and poor in the world has grown even in the so called good times. Curtains drawn? Maybe they are dead already:

Joyce Carol Vincent: How could this young woman lie dead and undiscovered for almost three years?
When the film-maker Carol Morley read that the skeleton of a young woman had been found in a London bedsit, she knew she had to find out more…

This is also typical of the breakdown of trust and the hardening of social stratification in hard times, and is especially malevolent coming from a senior government official and is pure neo-liberal divide and conquer, blame the poor rhetorical propaganda. Goebbels would be proud. Welfare in future will be only for the rich, with lots of land:

There are at least four different themes in the discussion on defining ’active farmers’ in order to better target direct payments to the intended beneficiaries:

(a) To avoid the leakage of payments to beneficiaries whose principal business has nothing to do with farming (for example, golf courses, airports, municipalities);

(b) To avoid the leakage of payments to ‘sofa farmers’, by which is meant persons who own land and gain entitlements to a payment but where the land is not used for production. Investors renting areas of Scottish moorland to activate high-value entitlements are an example of this category.

(c) To address the leakage of payments from tenant farmers to landlords in the case of rented land. The capitalisation of payments into land rents occurs naturally as a result of market forces, but the division of payments between landlord and tenant is also regulated by law in many countries and a number of countries want more guidance on this in the basic law.

(d) A concern with the redistribution of payments from ‘active’ (for which read ‘productive’) farmers to more marginal (read ‘unproductive’ farmers) in moving from the historical to flat-rate payment system under the Commission’s proposal. Those representing farmers with high-value entitlements use the argument that entitlements should go to ‘active’ farmers in an attempt to maintain the historical system status quo.

and bad banks!

Welfare for the rich Oh yes…

L,
Sid.

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