Tuesday, March 8, 2016

The rich are taking the biscuit


Colin Davies
OK, so we live in a time when right wing politics is on the rise. People like Donald Trump are gaining support by blurting out cheap, fear laden ideas that feed hate filled views and give people with underlying racist attitudes a voice, someone who speaks for them. They dress it all up as Trump is just a man who “tells it like it is.”
But he doesn’t speak for the ordinary man. He speaks for rich people. Vomiting out thoughts that the mega rich have. Taping into that most basic of primal phobias. “They ain’t like us, so they want to hurt us.” By using this notion this rich egotist can poke at the hornets nest and rally up an angry mob. Much like Hitler did in the 1930s.
I’m not the first to point this out, and I won;t be the last. I am though, beginning to get annoyed at the whole class and money divide. They way that people in power flaunt their wealth in order to pitch people low down the pecking order against each other.
Its like the banker and the biscuits metaphor is more of an instructional text than a wry piece of satire.
A banker, a Daily Mail reader and a benefit claimant are sat at a table. On a plate in the middle are 12 biscuits. The banker takes 11 biscuits for himself, then turns to the Daily Mail reader and says — “watch out for that benefit claimant, he’s after your biscuit”
And it doesn’t stop their. In the UK they have just ran a campaign called “Clean for the Queen.” They were trying to encourage the normal working people (a lot of whom are on very low wages) to go out and clean up the rubbish from the streets left there by disenfranchised youth, overpaid sales executives who think dropping litter is giving people jobs, and the lack of street cleaners because the cut being made by the austerity ideology of this right wing government to try and clean up the mess left behind from helping the bank industry after it destroyed the economy with its own greed. So that the Queen could walk to the shops on her 90th birthday without seeing a disregarded crisp packet.
The power that be truly believe this is something ordinary people would love to do, with a little fist pumping encouragement. But the truth is, it is hard out there. People are struggling to feed their kids while the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are releasing photos of them going on their first skiing holiday since the birth of their second child because “its been hard to get away.”
Call me Dave and his coke snorting chum George, are making policies based on their own personal views of how things should work, not on the fact presenting themselves out there in the real world. Ian Duncan Smith, who resides of a department and implements policies that have killed my British people that ISIS, seems to ooze contempt for the commoner trying to get by on less than £70 a week. The modern rhyming slang Jeremy (taking over from Gareth and Barkley) talks with such arrogance about the Jr Doctor’s contracts that it is easy to understand why his name keep getting thrown back at him.
Time after time, the people on the bread line get shafted and then the rich and powerful get shoved in their faces; just to rub it in how poor they are, or were. The government is changing what it means to be poor. By re-classifying it and moving the number that is considered to be the breadline down, they will manage to take thousands of children out of poverty. By shifting them from one column to another. These kids are still hungry, only now, the politicians don’t think they are poor.
There needs to be a redress in the balance of power and wealth. I’m not opposed to people making money, or even being rich. I am however, utterly disgusted when people loose their jobs or have to take low paid work because ‘the purpose of a company is first and foremost to maximize shareholder value.’ So even though a company has made a good profit, because it wasn’t as good as last years, they have to engage in cost cutting just to keep the value of shares up so that the people who already have lots of money can make more money by doing nothing other than buying part of a company and insisting that company lays people off so that the not as good a profit doesn’t effect their money.
Donald Trump is part of this problem. A rich bigot who has no understanding of the real world. A man who can play to the WASPs and get them singing. He is the one taking 11 cookies and then telling the middle classes that the Mexicans want the one left for them.
Colin is an award winning author; short listed spoken word artist; script writer; satirist; comedian; philosopher; role player; comic book reader; lover of films & muisc.

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