Rise – by Jamie Newell

The biggest threat to our way of life are not our governments or the terrorists they claim to be chasing across the globe. It is our apathy.

The Royal Mail, educational system, NHS and emergency services have been built by the blood, sweat and tears of you and your grandparents, going back 100 years. Today they are seen as cash cows for corrupt politicians and their privateer friends to siphon off billions in public money, to line their private pockets and they are using the veil of austerity to do so. They have managed, somewhat convincingly, to persuade a large section of society that austerity is both real and necessary and are praying on our apathy to resist.

Alessio Rastani once told us that a recession is not bad for everyone, that it is an opportunity to make money; this is not a recession or a recovery, it is a robbery.

Worryingly this agenda is being pursued by both Labour and Conservatives alike, one hard and fast and the other a kind of “I can’t believe it’s not austerity”, or “austerity-lite” approach.

Either way the result is the same. Hard working people are being forced to bear the brunt of paying for a crisis created by corrupt politicians, rogue bankers and immoral (if not illegal) banking practices,  not once (with the bailout) but two or three times over with respect to the austerity and cuts we have seen since.

In the meantime these pigs at the trough of public money have used our taxpayers money to pay for their second homes, heat horses stables, order a £39 breakfast (whilst telling us we can live on £52 a week) and are set to take an 11% pay rise leaving the rest of us with their scraps on zero hour contracts and lining up at food banks hoping for a meal ticket.

You cannot make it up.

The leaders of both these parties are no longer interested in popularity contests (as Thatcher or Blair might have been) at election time because there are common themes, goals and aims among them. They are ultimately all gorging themselves at the same trough of public money and broadly speaking, their sole interest is themselves and we have allowed them to with our apathy.

The NHS as mentioned has already been paid for by our parents and grandparents, the problem we have is that far too few of us are old enough to remember a time when you would had to pay for a doctor call out and all the associated care that goes with it, even less have stopped to think about the dangers we all face because of privatisation.

Some may think that they will see no real problem and no real change because they already have some form of private medical care, paid for either by their employer or private policy but the key point here is that these private firms are now backed up and supported by the publicly owned and funded NHS.

Even the Royal spawn, despite all its top private care, was delivered in a private hospital, ably supported by the “full weight of resources of the NHS” should anything have gone wrong. Kay Burleigh from SKY News told us just after we found out how dilated Katie was.

Where will this support network be once the lot has been sold of to the great bearded one, Richard Branson?

In the case of the NHS, our politicians have gone to great lengths to show us how badly the NHS is failing and have been duly assisted by a complicit mainstream media, none more so than our publicly owned and funded BBC, who reel off story after story about “nurses on safari” looking for patients or failing NHS trusts. As bad as some of these stories may be, these are an infinitesimally small percentage of the millions of people treated by wonderful doctors, nurses and paramedics every day of the year, any time we call on them.

Where are our survivor stories?

Along with the horror stories run by the mainstream media, the government also repeatedly tell us that immigrants (who are not even here yet) are to blame for the failure and capacity issues of our A&E departments etc and now they intend for people to prove their origins before they are treated at A&E?

You cannot make it up.

These blatant lies and scapegoating about immigrants are used to prey on people’s fears and prejudices, manufactured by a corrupt elite to deflect our attention on their intent to walk away with billions in profit at the cost of our health and welfare.

How has it come to privatisation?

The process to privatisation is a simple but effective one; first the government goes through a period of de-funding which creates an environment for failure, you then assess the failure and they are reported with the cost to make improvements being amplified as a result. The privateers then swoop in with the answer to take ever-increasing costs and liabilities off of the taxpayers hands, all the while feeding you distraction stories of immigrants, bad nurses and creating apathy to convince you that a nice guy like Branson will make a good job of it.

Really? He is a business person whose sole  purpose and drive is about making money.

Would you really want someone in charge of something that makes money solely off of the death and illness of people?

The only way they can make profit from a service such as the NHS is by charging us for treatments, reducing wages of the nurses providing the majority of the care (not the execs, they get paid off to push through change) and by generally hanging us out to dry. See how cheap health insurance will be when they know you cannot rely on the NHS and they have us at their mercy. These firms will have cornered the market and will drive up prices. Just look at what the energy firms are preparing to do this winter with nearly 10% increase in price’s or the announcement of another increase in our rail fares.

The apathy they are trying to foster enables them to impose these changes because we feel we cannot make a difference and that we cannot make a change.

We have given up our power and we have to take it back.

One person can make a difference and everyone should do so, if we do not start offering a resistance to these attacks now and come to realise we have more in common with each other than with these merciless privateers and criminals running the country, then we will quite literally be cut adrift.

We can do this by winning the hearts and minds of the people around us, taking interest in each others causes and not waiting for people to come to us, we can withdraw economically from certain corporations to redistribute the pain, we can write music, draw, sing and create art – the true way of protesting and engaging the hearts and minds of others.

We inherited a world of opportunity from our parents, we have a duty to hand it on to the next generation in a better state than the one we have inherited and not sell it from under them for a fist full of dollars.

Rise.

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Author Bio:

Jamie writes at Red Pill Medium which is a collaborative umbrella group of like-minded people for an alternative and urban media source in the digital revolution. They welcome comments, criticism, ideas and inspiration; question everything.

Also see: It All Seems Limitless – by Jamie Newell

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