Chocolate – Our exploitation of workers

As we eat perhaps even more chocolate than usual on a day for the Christians among us, the masses go round stuffing their faces unaware or uncaring at the level of our corporate exploitation of black workers. Slavery never went away, it just got buried by those in the marketing and advertising professions whose evil daily work covers up their corporate masters greed and profiteering at any cost. Economic slaves taste chocolate for the first time

Advertisement

UK Election 2015 – time for a major change

With the UK general election almost upon us isn’t time that we had some radical changes? Here are some to think about:

1. Empty properties in London and other major cities, if they are not being lived in by the owners for more than a month per year then the local councils have the right to rent them out at affordable rents to people. This would stop the one percent using our cities and homes as investment vehicles.

2. Corporations, all corporations in retail, food, clothing and entertainment to be limited. Let’s put individuality, small owners, family businesses back into the running of our cities.

3. Commercial property owners of retail space, cap and reduce the rent they can charge allowing non corporate businesses to start and flourish.

I’m sure that there are a few more that we can think of to divide up the wealth in a fairer way.

Let’s break the chains that bind us the ninety nine percent.

Christmas Eve – so spare a thought at least for other human beings

So here we are gearing up for another Christmas Eve. So let’s spare a thought for all those humans who will still sleep rough tonight and all those caught up in wars and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Let’s not forget about all those who don’t have access to clean water or to proper toilets and sewage systems. The many that lack adequate housing, heating, lighting, education and medical services. And those that don’t have enough or proper food to eat. If you read blogs you are unlikely to be one of them, if you have bought presents made in a number of countries you have probably bought something made by one of them. So think long and hard about the 25th of December, even if you aren’t a Christian, it is still a religious day not a day of capitalism. We must demand fair wages for those who make our goods. GLOBAL MINIMUM WAGE and GLOBAL SAFE WORKING PRACTICES NOW.

Word on the Water – A Tale of Corporate Greed – Private Eye 1380

David v Goliath might be the next Hollywood blockbuster, they must be making it after having made Noah etc, but in the real world Goliath Inc, Goliath Corp and Goliath PLC kill and trample all over David the good guy. And here is just another tale of the little guys losing out to the corporate monsters. So let’s start with a couple of photos to illustrate who the good guys are. This is the canal boat, Word on the Water, a floating bookshop and poetry venue. And this is the cat that lives on the boat. The photos were taken near one entrance of Paddington station on the Grand Union Canal. In an article titled, “Paddington bare”, Private Eye explains that the Canal and River Trust have selected British Land to take two new permanent trade moorings and you can guess where :-). They plan to open a floating coffee shop and “Welcome centre” in the two moorings. The article adds that there are already more than a dozen coffee outlets in the area including one on a canal boat. So huge evil corporation that has spent £470 million (how much of that is debt?) buying up the local area versus a small independent business and cultural space. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the ending and it isn’t a Hollywood one. Story copyright of Private Eye. Buy it, you will be amazed.

The Pantanal Brazil – Still Pink, The setting sun over the Pantanal

My partner and I have been very lucky to have traveled a bit and one of the places we went to was the Pantanal in Brazil. This area is the world’s largest tropical wetland area. As such it is a very diverse place for fauna and flora. We took this beautiful photo on one of the days we were there. You can buy a copy of it from our website http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk. Unfortunately, 99% of the Pantanal is privately owned for ranching and agriculture with perhaps 8 million or more cattle now eating it. Such heavy farming is bound to degrade this very special area and we hear so many verbal alarm bells from conservationists and scientists that most humans become immune, feel powerless or simply don’t care. There are some very simple numbers regarding us, humanity, and we can’t face them. So at the risk of repeating myself one more time. When we entered this inter-glacial (and exited what was probably NOT the last ice age) period some 15,000 years ago there were supposedly 5,000,000 of us. In terms of our “clean” water all of them would have been without it. Now there are more than 7,000,000,000 of us and still increasing and 780,000,000 of that very large number do not have access to “clean” water. As our politicians and nations kick the ball of climate change around while corporations and big business stop them aiming for a goal of living within the planet’s means there seems little hope of survival for beautiful places like the Pantanal. Think about the numbers, those 780,000,000 have every right to a decent life so how much concrete are we going to have to pour and steel are we going to have to make to give these people water, housing, roads, schools, hospitals and everything else that goes with our modern life. And it is not as if we have levelled off in our numbers for our global population is still increasing. I personally think it is time for a one child policy for the entire planet until we can get ourselves down to a reasonable number where we aren’t fouling our own nest. If we don’t then in a couple of generations those children will have as much chance of seeing some of the species of the Pantanal as they will of seeing a dinosaur.

Wake up the sheep and kick the collective corporate butt part 1

I’m just amazed at how many of my fellow human beings allow themselves to be treated like sheep or some other dumb animals by the evil corporations and their marketing departments. Let’s start with zero hour contracts and how they are just an evil manifestation of corporate greed and how they are taking away the possibility of a good life for many of our younger generation. For the fast food outlets operating this despicable form of employment it would be so easy to add a small percentage to each sale and pay people a decent regular wage. What can we do about it? That’s funny because the Internet gives us all this power to kick the butt of corporate retail and yet nobody is doing it. Everything is based on trends but we the buying public have the power to mess with the corporate mind as much as screw around in ours. If we got ourselves organised just imagine what we could do. Consider two corporate crap food outlets selling our favourite food, corporate A and corporate B. All we got to do is talk to each other on the Internet and then for one week flash mob Corporate A and leave Corporate B empty and then the next week reverse the trend. We can do this. We are slowly losing control to corporations and to technology but it doesn’t have to be that way. We could play the same game with corporate coffee houses or anywhere like that, supermarkets, we can really mess with their heads or we can remain in the paddock and wait for the slaughter of the innocents. It is our choice people and if I remember the words of a song from a few years ago, “take a chance while you still gotta choice”. I leave you with that thought.