Vested Interest In The House - Part 3

Essential Services: Big business can mean big profits and the financing and running of any country or society is certainly big business, the biggest in fact, spending many hundreds of billions annually across many areas. If you can get a slice of that action you can do very well, especially if your friends have their fingers on the purse strings and can unilaterally decide where the money goes. They can send big chunks of it your way. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you can get into essential services, the market is guaranteed and on-going; the clue being in the word essential. This of course includes the basics of food, water, shelter and energy, but there are also many other areas in our society that are everyday essential things, such as civil engineering, waste disposal, the prison services, transport, etc. Much of this used to be managed and run by the people via the local authorities and other public bodies. Now most of it is privatised, run by private companies on lucrative contracts, plus big bonuses for the bosses. It is often the case in such instances that the price goes up and the service goes down. Less for more! Why? Because as well as the very significant big fat salaries and bonuses that these people now extort from the public purse, we now have to pay a nice tidy sum to the faceless people behind the scenes, the consortiums of individuals who own and control these companies.

Non-Profit: Once upon a time we could run such companies and services on a non-profit making basis because there were no faceless shareholders to worry about. In fact, we were the shareholders. The public. In recent times, via one mechanism or another, these people have siphoned billions from the public purse to bloat their fortunes. They even take a slice of the National Lottery and when Richard Branson offered to run it on a non-profit making basis, he was turned down. The underhanded takeover of everything to screw the public purse it seems is now taking place with our schools via the new academies and even our police force is being covertly privatised. As the Government run down the numbers by tens of thousands each year, private security companies such as G4S are being hired on very profitable contracts to take up the slack. The faceless phew have recently acquired the Royal Mail and they now want the NHS as well.

Name Of The Game: Of course, it’s not always easy to see where the profits go and who is actually benefitting. The people making the killing are often hidden from view behind many layers. Cheating the system and the people from a distance has become an art form for some as they run companies from within companies, use loopholes, fronts and offshore banking to their advantage. They seem to think that cheating and ruthless self-interest is the name of the game. However, the cost to ordinary people is significant, devastating some more than others, as they have a miserable and stressful existence, perpetually struggling to get by and feed themselves and their kids. The money people also had another massive perk of late with the public having to bail out the bankers. They literally siphoned billions out of the banking system and then took money from the public purse to replace it. This was done without the agreement of those footing the bill and the public were sold a sob story to try and justify it and the bankers still got their inflated bonuses. There are some very, very rich people out there doing very, very nicely out of a system that is controlled and manipulated to suit them and those just like them. All those in the Con Club!

A New Buzzword: Recently we have had yet another devious tactic from the super-rich. A new buzzword! Austerity! Meant to make the ordinary people think that they must all pull their belts in such ‘hard times’ and get them used to the idea of working more for less. In the meantime the super-rich, believe it or not, have been getting substantially richer! Yes, corruption is at the core of our very own government and the stench has now filtered down to our local authorities choking us even more. Due to ‘austerity’, government cuts mean local authorities have had to deal with much more financial pressure themselves, which of course, naturally everyone expects to be passed on to us - the great unwashed. The knock-on effect is that our own local authorities have now become more underhanded, employing tactics and introducing schemes to penalise the public, selling off public land and facilities that we would rather keep and hounding us with so-called civil enforcement officers hiding behind every lamppost. The squeeze has gotten notably worse over the years, with services that used to be part of what you already paid for now being charged additionally. More and more pressure for the poor. More and more profit for the faceless phew!