Tag: Exploitation

Profiteering is alive, well and adding to people’s financial misery every day. It’s just hiding in plain sight

Right now, there is a cost-of-living crisis underway. You may well be one of those fortunate enough to have only been upset by the rising costs, rather than one of the growing number now going short.

But the misery for many is real. It is happening around us all today.

Sadly, this cost-of-living crisis, the inflation and the shortages contributing to it are going to get exponentially worse. So much worse, the cost-of-living crisis is going to contribute to a complete system collapse.

Whilst the ultimate responsibility for the responses to the events which are easy to blame for the cost-of-living crisis, such as Brexit, Covid and the War in Ukraine lie firmly at the feet of our politicians, there are other purely greed-driven influences at work too. Private interests that are exploiting the ineptitude and ignorance in government, to line their own pockets.

Profiteering, cynically hidden in plain sight, is helping to make what would always have been a very challenging time for many, a looming disaster that is going to affect us all.

Privately owned and corporate businesses, many of whom are some of the worst for putting out messages that tell us they are doing all they cant to help us and that they are the victims of price rises and shortages themselves, are the very worst when it comes to making massive profits on the basis that people will accept the rises because of Brexit, Covid or Ukraine, when what the real price inflation and what they are exploiting our good will to charge are nowhere near the same.

Everything that could has gone the way of big business, corporate interests and those who ‘know someone’ since the first Lockdown began in 2020, simply because our stupid and inept politicians have tried to deal with every single problem they were elected to solve by writing cheques.

This has led to many in the business world to believe that its ok to keep inflating prices of the goods and services they sell – being certain as they are, that government will have to step in and sure-up the price and the ability of everyone to keep on paying the bills.

Yet wholesale energy prices have come down, and so-called shortages that big retailers are using to justify the extraordinary levels of food price inflation simply don’t exist at the present time – even if they could do so very soon.

Just about every kind of product or service that each and every one of us are using every day, is shooting up in the retail price that we pay. Either that or the products we buy are being reduced in size or quality – which in real terms amounts to getting less whilst paying more.

We literally now have to buy even more of everything, just to stand still.

Yes, it is absolutely true that the very stupid people we have running the Country are responsible for creating the myth that no matter what happens, everyone will still continue to get paid.

But stupidity on the part of Government, legislators and regulators should not be a green light for businesses to keep charging more and then charge whatever they like.

Just because legislation doesn’t prevent profiteering, meaning that businesses can exploit any excuse that people will believe to do so, doesn’t make it right or necessary either.

Sadly, greed-driven, unethical businesses have been at the creative centre of the cost-of-living crisis, globalisation, and everything that has led to the situation that we now face, right from the very start. And that start wasn’t Brexit, Covid or Ukraine.

For decades, poor politicians have allowed businesses to plunder resources and exploit us all for profit and private gain.

Working within the law or regulations that exist doesn’t exclude any business or private interest from the moral and ethical responsibilities that they have to everyone and everything else. Especially when they are likely to have had the rules changed or created to allow them to do all this in the first place.

This Blog was originally published in May 2022 and then as part of the book ‘From Here to There Through Now’ in October 2022. It has been edited and updated by The Author.

Advertisement

The cultural shift from having values to nothing but the worship of money was built on our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, exploited by those at the top

The dreams of big money and corporate interests had all come true, the very moment that this age of Neoliberalism was born.

Not only because the elites had untapped the rivers of gold that only ‘those in the know’ had access too because they or their friends could literally print money out of thin air to invest in whatever they wanted with ‘real’ money from customers coming back at them in return.

Not only because the elites could use the useful idiots they had found in the form of stupid, ambitious and above all corruptible politicians who would change rules and regulations to favour their interests at every turn.

Not only because they could move just about every form of production and manufacturing that existed to Countries far away, where the rules that more westernised nations had fought for and took for granted could be ignored and ridiculous increases in bottom line margins would result.

But because above all, this group of politicians, business leaders and people with a lot of money now knew that they had the power to tell people who were losing their jobs, losing their incomes, losing their communities, losing their value and losing their integrity, that the whole thing was in their best interests, and that they would be much better off financially and materially as a result.

The whole thing has been the worlds biggest confidence trick. But it worked and it has continued to work for as long as it has done, simply because so many of us have been blinded by the ‘easy money’, the great cars, the fashionable clothes, the foreign holidays, and the blinding light of money becoming the ruler of everything.

This is where self-interest and the lack of questioning from us all has now led. And its all about to collapse.

For some to be rich, it does not follow that everyone else must be poor

Only accelerated by the arrival of the Internet and the media age, the dehumanisation of the relationships between each of us and any of the people we do not know has become destructively profound.

Greed has always been a problem, particularly for those who are insulated by the privilege of their positions, conditioning or upbringing.

But the impact from the lack of care or the consideration of the impact or consequences of actions that are increasingly profitable for the self-serving who have power, have never done so much damage to the lives of others as they are doing right now.

As the unscrupulous have increasingly taken more influence and control, they have changed the rules and frameworks that govern our system to push balance and fairness further and further away from us. Meanwhile, they have continued to consolidate the grip that they have, enriching themselves and those they identify as being of their kind, in a process that works purely on the basis that so they can win, it follows that many others must be the ones to lose.

There is nothing natural about the way that any of this works. The system is based on the accumulation of wealth and of money. Money, that has power only because of the belief that we have all foolishly placed in it. Money that doesn’t actually exist.

Money makes money, when it should only be effort and the contribution that any of us make, that defines any of us beyond a Basic Living Standard or benchmark that should exist and be maintained at the same level, so that there are the very same opportunities as a basis for all.

Until we reach the point when we all realise and accept that it is our values and our integrity in our relationship with others and the world around us that makes us ridiculously rich, rather than the money we have or the things that we own, no matter what we have, we will all remain very poor.

Unsustainable Living. Unsustainable everything. Unsustainable for too long.

Together, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the cost-of-living crisis, energy prices, the way that Covid was handled, food poverty and hunger, social mobility issues, climate change, housing shortages, immigration or indeed any other problem that we can see.

These problems have been developing, growing and creating even more issues through their knock-on effects over a period of many years.

Today, more and more people are asking questions about why things really are the way that they are, rather than simply accepting them as being normal, as we have been doing – and have been encouraged to do so by narratives – for a very long time.

Regrettably, bad decision making can take a very long time to work itself through and can remain unhindered up until the end result. It can and will cause a lot of pain to innocent people, before it finally does.

No public policy – or the effect thereof – that hurts people or is unfair to anyone is sustainable in the long term. And the long term, can be a very long time indeed.

Even then, when vested interests benefit from the existence of that policy or that approach, they will do all that they can to keep that opportunity open – or to maintain that narrative, often being consciously unaware of or blind to the pain that they cause to so many others by doing so.

Many different things haven’t been working as they should – and have been hurting people as a result – for all that time.

So many, in fact, that there is very little public policy that now exists or works proactively to create or maintain a balanced way of living in any genuine way.

What is remarkable about this situation is just how ridiculous the situation has become, where so much has been wrong about the way that we live, but at the same time, because of just how bad things are, the wrong people have been able to succeed at keeping things as they are, or indeed actually making them worse.

The fact is that the wrong leaders give us the wrong results.

The minimum wage has been a way to keep wages low

This particular way of benchmarking gave employers a moral get-out clause. So, if they could demonstrate that employees were always in receipt of the minimum wage or its equivalent, they simply didn’t feel obliged to worry about anything else.

Salaries have been used to hide the fact that employees were being paid less than the minimum wage when things like the hours actually worked were calculated, making what appeared to be generous levels of pay turn out to be anything but.

By creating more and more laws in an attempt to cover every eventuality, our politicians just give the unscrupulous more and more loopholes to find.

The gig economy

One of the most sinister and indeed cynical aspects of industry today, is to look at the laws that exist using highly paid legal professionals, and then find the gaps or loopholes that are not covered, and then identify the opportunities that they can exploit.

Under the guise of being self-employed, many people who want to work are drawn into ‘employment’ that may appear to pay well in terms of hourly rates. But the companies hiring them – who are actually just dodging the additional costs associated with employing people frequently fail to make clear that the rider, courier, driver or whatever trendy name their role has been given has to cover the costs of carrying out whatever work they do from whatever they are given too.

What the media don’t tell us – as good investigative journalists operating without fear of the consequences would do, is that many of the companies that function within or are wholly dependent upon the gig economy can only exist because they have found these loopholes to exploit people legally and therefore make their platforms profitable when they wouldn’t be in any other way.

Many of these companies are now very well known. They may well be bringing something you have ordered using an app to your door today. Yet the people coming to all of our doors to provide these services are being exploited in potentially many ways, whilst our politicians champion such ‘opportunities’ as being ‘jobs’.

Regrettably, the reason the gig economy exists is a) because the people behind them have a lot of money and influence over our politicians and b) because we like having easy and quick access to whatever we want and especially so when we believe that for us its ‘cheap’.

The unethical rich control and are raising the prices of everything a struggling public needs

Those with the money either own the businesses that provide the things that we need or have significant if not disproportional influence upon them and how they work.

In a world now dominated by an obsession with wealth and profit, the motives that drive the businesses which have defining control over the way that industry and the markets work are solely focused on the bottom line. They drive the increase of net profit margins at every turn.

Man cannot have two masters. And any business that has lost sight of why it exists, whether it be to produce the best goods, the best food, the best services or the best experience, it will always be looking to make ways to improve those margins to keep feeding the greed and ambition of the people at the top or those on their way there.

In circumstances where commercial self-interest has consistently pushed an agenda of deregulation and so-called ‘freedom of the markets’, we find ourselves in a financial and economic maelstrom where companies at the top of any marketplace can charge and do what they want. Not because its morally right. But because the laws they have influenced into being, to be amended or to be removed tell them that they can.

The whole downward spiral is presented in the form of a narrative that tells the public at large that the markets will always look after everything if the reach of government is kept to the absolute minimum that it can be.

Yet this narrative fails to tell the same trusting public that it pushes power further and further into the hands and control of the very few who are at the top of this twisted money tree. And that the process of unhindered deregulation only leads to price rises and misery for the people at the bottom whilst the bank accounts swell and gift even more opportunities for control at the very top.

This system is based on the economic theory or philosophy called Neoliberalism. Ironically, even many of those speaking out against the way that Governments are working today, do not understand the realities of what giving control of the system to the bankers and the industrialists actually does.

The only saving grace – if you can call it that, is that the spiral downwards (which the neoliberals believe heads the other way for as long as they are in profit and making money) inevitably leads only to one place: A systemic collapse. Because you cannot break one end of a completely unbalanced society and think for even one minute that the other end of it can maintain its very questionable and unbalanced place.

New houses never lower prices within their local ‘market’ and the Persimmon CEO’s £110 Million Bonus gives our ‘housing crisis’ the lie

Money HousesHousing has become one of the hot political issues of our time. To read and hear about it in the media, it has become easy to conclude that the Government, our Councils, Housing Associations and Builders alike all share the view that we are in a housing crisis. The picture they paint suggests that they are all doing everything that they possibly can. But should we all really believe?

Laid bare, the lack of housing really does look nothing like the story we are being presented. Immigration inflating real need exponentially has become as much an unspoken truth across the whole country, as it has that 2nd homeowners are leaving seaside and rural property empty for much of the year, whilst they add nothing financially to the communities in which they don’t have time to genuinely reside.

“We need to build more homes” has become the mantra of the many. Yet the real beneficiaries of this process will not be the people who will end up living in many of them. Nor will it be the Government which is operating on the premise that money is the only way to solve any problem, no matter what it might be.

The real beneficiaries of the push to create housing will be the builders and the bankers who finance them, whose real take from all the public money which is being fire-hosed at them is only too well illustrated by the bonus payment being made to the CEO of Persimmon Homes.

Under the auspices of self-serving government at all levels and the ineptitude of policy making and long term strategy which has been rolled out in real time within current planning policy, Builders and Developers of all kinds have found themselves within what can only be described as a smorgasbord of discount and profit and the epitome of the one-sided win-win.

Deals are and have been done, not on the basis of what is best for us all. For if that were the true intention, there would be little need for deals of this kind.

Deals are being done, because the focus of this housing crisis is little more than money and profit itself.

People young and old are being out priced in all parts of the housing market, not because prices reflect the true value of houses and the market, but because the system and government policy is facilitating house builders, mortgage lenders and private landlords to take us all on one massive, great big bubble-building ride.

The evidence is not difficult to find. Wherever we may live, new housing developments are never far away. Yet when homes are released, we never see prices being lowered nearby.

Lower house prices within the communities in which these additional homes are built would be the logical outcome within any localised market which was genuinely left to itself to determine and decide.

Instead this so-called ‘crisis’ continually goes on unsolved, whilst we are being sleepwalked into a national travesty in the shape of an unsustainable housing price bubble which is guaranteed to explode.

When it does, those profiteering and responsible now will be the first to run and hide.

image thanks to unknown