The Violence of Austerity
The book has been written and edited by
Vickie Cooper and David Whyte.
Mr Whyte is Professor of Socio-legal studies
at the University of Liverpool. He has written for The Guardian, The Herald and
The Age and the Red Pepper.
Vickie Cooper is a lecturer and researcher of
Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University.
First of all I haven´t read the book yet,
but I´ve found a video about it. In this video authors explain some parts. We
can hear distressing affirmations accepted by all of us that give an idea of
how the successive governments in UK have made a strategy in order to make a
lot of money at the expense of the poorest.
Let´s see some aspects.
The
trickle down effect.
In my opinion, followers of this idea are wrong. This maybe occurs in
the fashion world, no in important things. I can buy something appropriate to
my pocket but I think I could never buy a £30000 car, a £50000
car even less, and we don´t speak about a yacht or a big mansion —things that,
obviously, I don´t need. My old Wauxhall (Astra) drove me to the factory when I
was “on active service” and now it drives me through the South of Portugal and,
of course, I really enjoy my humble pad. On the other hand, as I´m not a
Football Club President, a boat doesn´t fit with me. Therefore austerity as a
class project breaks the bond between the influences from the upper class to
the lower class and only the wealthy can afford an expensive product.
The
Bedroom Tax
A rough-and-ready explanation would be: if you are a working age person
in social housing and you have a spare bedroom you might see your housing
benefit claim reduced by £40 to £80. One might put it like this: we ought to pay
for m3 in our home —when will they charge us for breathing?
Work
Capability Assessment
A new lashing are suffering disabled people. The WCA is linked to almost
600 suicides in three years, according to a study by Oxford and Liverpool University.
They “decide whether jobless welfare claimants are entitled to sickness
benefits.”
Can you learn how to do an everyday
task such as setting an alarm clock?
The askance about the test used by the Department for Work and Pensions
is evident. The threshold for being considered unfit for work is really high.
By a little stretch of the imagination one can think that the politinkers have
planned a painful form of institutional violence. On one hand assessors are not
always appropriately qualified, on the other hand the “work capability
assessment” is inadequate way of assessing referred to mental health.
Can you see to cross the road
on your own?
Atos,
Maximus, Wonga
They sound like musketeers. However they are organizations specialised in
hi-tech services, big data and cybersecurity services (Atos), partnered with
governments to provide human service programmes (Maximus), and a British payday
loan company (Wonga).
Companies like these “have grown their markets as a result of forcing
people into debt”, while governments are washing its hands of it.
Maxed
out our credit card
Bankiticians encourage us to use more and more our card —our credit card—
in order to keep their control on us. They have been, the Right, the Left, who
created the financial crisis because austerity is an aimed project and as
result, the richest in my country earn twice as much.
When United Nations reports that austerity makes bigger the rift between
people our governments turn a deaf ear!
Austerity,
a deception
Cooper and Whyte say that austerity is a deception because at the
beginning the low class thought that with tightening the belt, in a few years
the problem would be overcome. Nevertheless nine years after the situation is
worse. It wasn´t worth.
This people was deceived by the high class and they are bearing the
dirty trick. Insofar as the time passes an impotence feeling is raising into
the bottom class.
An impotence feeling like we had when we were teenagers.
LDR
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