By deliberately manipulating bank interest rates, governments make stock market
gains slightly more profitable but such 'investments' also carry tremendous
risk. It can't have escaped anyone's attention that the pension crisis is in
fact closely coupled to, and a major result of, stock market failures of recent
years, as have been many financial catastrophes.
With one leading private pension company in Britain already all but collapsed
and most pension funds predicting shortfalls and loss of pension income, it
looks like all but the lucky few will face an crisis in old age.
Those at the start of their working lives, planning families which by nature
of government finances will be needed to pay state pensions for the generation
they follow, are poorly placed financially. With house prices for traditional
first-time buyer properties quite often being ten times the average income, and
with rents not that much cheaper, the young are strapped for cash as it is.
The old, hoping to use their property investment as a nest egg or a leg-up for
their own children, see it commandeered by the government and used to pay off
health care bills. Those facing retirement see pension funds collapsing around
them with no protection against shortfalls in what they expect to see or the
entire loss of what they have contributed over many years.
Employers are closing guaranteed, so-called "final salary", schemes and are
moving to contributions based schemes where the whole risk is left in the
hands of the employee, and employer contributions are lower.
There is no guarantee that any pension fund will have enough, if any, cash to
hand when it comes to pay out. Even the most protected government supported
pension funds such as those for civil servants are being closed, modified
and look less appealing than they once did. The only people who are left with
protected and guaranteed pensions are those in the highest echelons of society,
who have the highest incomes already. The rich keep getting richer, and the
poor can starve. It's no surprise that those who benefit are also the ones who
are deciding the fate of ourselves, lower down the food chain.
It is indeed necessary to be pragmatic about how we solve the problems faced,
but that pragmatism must be wide-sweeping and take into account the society we
have and what we expect it to deliver. Political ideology, if it is failing and
creating or making the potential crisis worse, should be reviewed and changed as
necessary.
Such an idea does not go down well within a system of capitalism which is in
truth the root cause of the problem. Rather than looking at what capitalism is
doing to society, government is more concerned about putting sticking plasters
over the cracks which are appearing and attempting to shore up the mess before
it falls over completely. Though it's more chasm than cracks, and structural
support is thin and weak, the government refuses to look the catastrophe in the
eye lest the ideology of profit, profit, profit for a small band of lucky
beneficiaries looks as terrible as it really is.
All government can promise to get ourselves out of the mess they and successive
governments have created is higher taxation, lower pensions and a longer working
life.
In a future where it was predicted that we'd be a lazy and lethargic 'leisure
society', whizzing around in jet-cars with nuclear power so cheap they would
give it away, it seems that it will actually be as bleak as the dark ages
ever were.
Maybe not from cradle to grave, but from the moment you step out of education
and enter employment, that will be your lot in life. Work, work and more work,
until you drop.
Visions of retiring, putting one's feet up or pottering round the garden,
seeing the world in the twilight years, swimming with dolphins, and all those
things we'd like to do before we depart this physical earth will be little
more than dreams and reserved for a very select few.
By the time most people retire anyway, they have, it is sad but true, only a
few years left to live. If the retirement age is pushed back to 75, as current
proposals plan, there may be more failing to reach retirement than getting
there. And if you aren't going to make it, then what is the point of
contributing to a pension fund or saving for later life in the first place ?
We can work and die doing so, or we can leave and suffer in poverty. That is
the stark choice which is on offer for many of us.
Can it really be that the answer to the question, "Why are we here ?", is simply
to allow us to slave our backsides off for endless year after endless year,
with nearly as much time spent commuting as working. That our purpose in life
is to work our fingers down to the bone in order to be given a few hours off
each week to sleep and spend a minuscule amount of time with our families ? Is
it any surprise that 'traditional society' is collapsing around us ? Most of us
are too tired to talk, and if we aren't working we are staring at a television
screen as our fertile minds are turned to mush by inactivity, too exhausted to
do much else.
We are in such deep despair that we spend more time watching other people's
lives, locked in houses or in the jungle encampment of a 'game show', than we do
in living our own.
You don't have to be a religious person to realise that the zombie-like
existence most of us endure has got to be less than the best we could have. Do
we really have any right to laugh when we look at the few indigenous and
yet to be indoctrinated people around the world who spend more of their time
with their feet up than engaged in toil. Can we really say that their lives are
genuinely that much worse than our own ? Is our desire to build a mountain
of materialistic possessions really worth what we have to put in ?
Can this really be why, by whatever means, we were put on this earth ? Is this
honestly the pinnacle of mankind's achievement and destiny ? I think not.
It is true to say that we get nothing for nothing, and that we need to work
to feed and clothe ourselves, and there are far more examples of those who
struggle and work as equally hard as we do, if not more so, for even less in
return, than we'd like to admit. At least we don't face starvation, homelessness
and destitution. Although we do, if we don't play the game created for us.
It's been clear for years that we are nothing but slaves to the system. "Wage
slaves", maybe, but we are as trapped as any slave has been in history. We
work for little more than to pay to live, and a handful of 'goodies' we may
enjoy by scrimping and saving. We are trapped by housing that we either have
to own or rent, and we are dragged into a housing market to play the game of
profiteering from others ourselves.
We are encouraged to help ourselves by playing the stock market, and are
desperate to gamble on stocks, bonds and the lottery, and are laughed
at when we fail by those who have extracted our money. For every penny we do
make there is some mechanism that has been designed to take some, if not all,
of it from us. As salaries increase, expenditure rises even faster, outgoings
regularly exceed income. Increases in interest rates boost savings which are
stripped from us in mortgage repayment increases and rising costs of goods. We
have precious little to put to one side for the short-term, let alone for a
future we can't predict. Even in debt we make a handsome profit for someone
else.
And if we want to stop the world and get off - that field with a tent in it
looking mighty promising instead - then we are trapped by Council Taxes and
rules and regulations which make it either impossible to do or impossible to
achieve without income, and we are forced to return to the fold. There is no
escape for the most of us. We are corralled by legislation which has been
designed to force us to comply, and most of us have been foolish enough to
not see it coming.
All of us condemn the slavery of the past, and yet we cannot see what we are,
and what we have become. Where those who suffered while others profited from
their work knew their liberty had been taken from them, we blindly believe that
we are free and take comfort from those who dictate our situation when they
tell us that we have the best that we could want, that we are happy. We are
willing participants in a scheme of subtly manipulated repression and
oppression. And we refuse to acknowledge it, for it scares us to do so. We
deny reality, and we do ourselves no favours.
Our future has been mapped out by a political system of ideology that was
identified for what it is years ago, and the system has designed itself to be
resistant to change. "If voting really did anything they'd ban it", may sound
amusing, but it shows the trap which we are in; nothing can change it. We are
dangled carrots of illusion to pull ourselves along by the masters who profit
from us and most of us fall for it, and there are few choices but to comply.
We live in the Metropolis that is a reality of today.
The system has failed. Capitalism is as flawed as it was the day it was invented
and yet we are encouraged to blindly believe that it is the best that there is.
It is patently not, and it's about time we did something about it.
