Ownership of your City’s Properties

I have been reading in Private Eye 1388 an article entitled “London’s laundry”. The article reports that according to Transparency International, https://www.transparency.org/ , there are 40,000 properties owned by foreign companies, 36,000 of them via tax havens. It is suggested that many are bought with dirty money. If we look deeper maybe we would find that as a Parisian or if you are a New Yorker or from any big city around the world trying to buy a property you may not able to because of a similar problem. The article in Private Eye goes on to say that our Met Police has been able to look at just 120 of these in the last ten years.

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Now If I Was A Betting Man

Fortunately for me I’m not. It looks very enticing at times in that somebody has to win but invariably there has to be a lot of losers as well for there to be a big winner. My partner took this photo of some very good street art in the East End of London. It is a very detailed piece of work and is a play on a well known chain of betting shops in the UK. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

Zero Hour Contracts – the shame of modern day economic slavery

Just as in previous centuries the wealthy were the cause of physical slavery so they are now the cause of economic slavery. On the pretense of competition and the necessity of these contracts some 700,000 workers are being exploited often by large multinational corporations who are also involved in serial tax avoidance. And where are our politicians to protect our workers from such abusive practices? On the other side of the fence of us the 99%. Just waiting for their handout from the same corporations that are exploiting the 99%. In the UK over the last decades their isn’t a single party and probably very few politicians who have done anything about reducing the wealth gap. And we can’t expect the next government of any party to be any different. What we need is the box on the ballot paper that says none of the above and for everyone to have to vote. If a large part of the population voted that the current holders of democracy were all rubbish then maybe we would have a chance to do something about it.

Don’t You Just Love a Holier Than Thou Capitalist? We are the 99%

So there’s this guy who’s in charge of of one of the big banking organisations writing about morality and money while all the while doing dodgy deals to give more money to the 1% and helping the flow of cash from illegal activities. I’m sure if he was one of us 99% he would be heading for prison but he’s a friend of the 1% so that’s never going to happen. Of course he could say that he didn’t know but let me ask you this, if you were in charge and were paid a huge amount of money to be in charge then surely if you screwed up you would be fired. But only if you were one of us 99%. I don’t remember much about my religious education but what would old JC have thought about all this? I seem to recall that he kicked the money lenders out of the temple.

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.